For this week’s Letter from Trump’s Washington, Antonia Hitchens is filling in for Susan B. Glasser.
“I love getting even with people,” Donald Trump told Charlie Rose, in a 1992 interview. Trump was promoting a new book, which he had just started to write, called “The Art of the Comeback.” It offered ten tips for success. Among them: play golf, always have a prenuptial agreement, get even. Getting even has been a lifelong preoccupation. My “retribution’s going to be success,” Trump said, in 2024, when asked how he’d avenge his political enemies if he were reëlected President. On Wednesday, during a televised Cabinet meeting, Trump, discussing the political impact of the war in Iran, said, “I don’t care about the midterms.” To the extent that he does care, it seems primarily about settling scores, not preserving Republican majorities. Most recently, in the Senate primary runoff in Texas, he had weighed in at the last minute to endorse Ken Paxton, the loyal but serially embattled state attorney general, who beat John Cornyn, the incumbent. Cornyn, Trump wrote, “is a good man, and I worked well with him, but he was not supportive of me when times were tough. . . . John was very late in backing me in what turned out to be a Historic Run for the Republican Nomination, and then, the Presidency, itself, both of which were Landslide Victories and, more importantly, gave us the Country that we have today—THE GOLDEN AGE OF AMERICA.” Ken Paxton, meanwhile, “has gone through a lot, in many cases, very unfairly, but he is a Fighter.” The same day, as part of a settlement agreement between Trump and the I.R.S., the Department of Justice announced the creation of a $1.8-billion “Anti-Weaponization” fund for victims of political persecution to seek a formal apology and monetary damages. “People were destroyed, they went to jail, their families were ruined, they committed suicide. . . . The Obama Administration started it. The Biden Administration was horrible in terms of what they’ve done to people,” Trump said. “It was the most violent thing I’ve ever seen in politics.” A five-member panel selected by the Attorney General would disburse the funds with seemingly no oversight.
During his 2024 Presidential campaign, Trump cast himself into a shared martyrdom with his supporters. “I am being indicted for you,” he would say, referring to the multiple criminal cases that had been brought against him. “All of this persecution of Donald Trump—I don’t mind, I’m doing it for you.” His attempts to impede the certification of the 2020 election led to him being charged with obstruction of an official proceeding, alongside hundreds of January 6th rioters. (In his case, the charges were thrown out when the Supreme Court ruled that, as President, he had absolute immunity for official acts.) On Trump’s first day back in office, he granted clemency to fifteen hundred or so convicted rioters, undoing the largest criminal investigation in American history. That day, he signed an executive order, titled “Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government,” which pointed out that January 6th had been “ruthlessly prosecuted” whereas cases against “BLM rioters” had been dropped. Many of the pardoned January 6th defendants thought this was merely the beginning of getting what they were owed. They wanted to come to the White House; they wanted to rewrite the historical record; they wanted money. Last June, the D.O.J. settled a wrongful-death lawsuit brought by the family of Ashli Babbitt, who was fatally shot by a Capitol police officer while trying to climb into the Speaker’s Lobby. The family was awarded nearly five million dollars; the Air Force offered to hold a funeral with full military honors. The D.O.J. started scrubbing its website of news releases about past January 6th prosecutions. Earlier this year, a large banner of Trump’s face was unfurled down the side of department headquarters.
January 6th defendants and their supporters, in particular, are quick to lament that certain promises dangled early on in the term—Steve Bannon hyping the prospect of D.C. Circuit Court judges being handcuffed and perp-walked, for instance—never materialized. Trump was focussed on Iran and Venezuela, not on avenging his most loyal followers; they complained that their grievances were relegated to the sidelines, at events held on off-nights at Mar-a-Lago, headlined by Mike Flynn, or to Roger Stone’s social-media pages, where he posted about Biden D.O.J. “frame jobs” that could be proved by reading a seven-part exposé. The forgotten understory of Trump’s second term played out on my feed—the endless posts about the “Fedsurrection,” a frenzy of annoyance that even Nancy Pelosi hadn’t been put in jail, a GiveSendGo campaign to create a January 6th digital archive (“PRESERVE THE EVIDENCE!”). I sometimes got the sense that nothing would ever be enough. Even after the fund was announced, some weren’t satisfied; one person wrote, on X, “J6ers shouldn’t have to apply for compensation. The government has all of the information. The government knows what was done to them.”
Recently, I called Robert Morss, a pardoned January 6th defendant who was eager to avail himself of the settlement money. “I’m not about to buy a Harley-Davidson,” he said. “I’m gonna take the money and put it back into improving my nation.” He’d started a production company to make a feature-length film about January 6th. (Tagline: “Two people do everything they can to survive weaponization and trust God and end up falling in love as a result.”) He’d also written two books about the “true story” of the riot, one of them co-authored with a leader of the Oath Keepers. “Trump can’t save the country on his own—he’s not supposed to,” he told me. “Read the Constitution. It’s meant to be the American people.”
In 2021, Morss, an Army veteran, was teaching high-school history in Pennsylvania. He wore his Army Ranger uniform—including body armor—when he entered the Capitol building, along with a mob of people trying to stop the certification of the 2020 election results. (“It wasn’t like I murdered somebody,” he said, of his conviction for assaulting police officers.) He was sentenced to five and a half years. Morss had been charged with a felony, so the state revoked his teaching certificate. Last year, he found a lawyer to help him sort out whether Pennsylvania owed him his teaching credential back now that he’d been pardoned. He wanted to return to teaching. “Half the country was convinced, inaccurately, that me and my wife were domestic terrorists,” he told me. “We were fired from our jobs. We lost friends and family. We absolutely deserve that money to rebuild our lives.” He’s now hired the same lawyer who he’d hoped could help with the teaching credential to work on his anti-weaponization claim.
Morss wants more than money. “I would like things to line up that make it painfully clear and obvious that January 6th was in fact a lobster trap,” he said. “I would really appreciate Donald Trump’s Department of Justice to ramp up not just arrests but get the testimony from people that were responsible, that they know were responsible, so that hopefully our country can mend—and point the finger at the real insurrectionists. We need to be incarcerating people for the stolen election, the pandemic, the Russia-collusion hoax—or completely redo the education system so real history is actually taught again.”
He told me that veterans of the First World War had once stormed the Capitol “because they were not given the paychecks that the government promised them, and they actually had to call in the National Guard.” Douglas MacArthur, the chief of staff of the Army, he went on, “was willing to fire on U.S. veterans after they’d fought in World War One, so much so that they brought up a tank in front of the White House. So things like this have happened before. But this moment in time, this fund, is unique, because our government has never gone out of its way to ruin so many people’s lives—other than, arguably, the time of slavery.” He compared the fund to the efforts mounted to compensate Native American tribes that were decimated by the U.S. government. “I would say that we have more in common with Native American tribes in America that had their way of life destroyed, as a tribe of patriots who still believe in the Constitution,” he said.
“There’s a zero-per-cent chance anyone gets any money from this,” a lawyer close to the Trump Administration told me. “It’s all going to be blocked in court.” He doubted the account would even be funded. “It’s like a shiny thing they’re dangling in front of a baby,” he continued. But it had opened up another front for Trump-era grift: lawyers willing to represent those seeking settlements. “You have no idea how many people have contacted me being, like, ‘How do I get money?’ ” he said. “It’s so gross.” A publicist for the scammer Anna Delvey and the disgraced rapper Sean Combs said that anyone who felt targeted by the D.O.J. would want to submit paperwork, no matter their politics. (The Trump critics James Comey and Michael Cohen have flirted with applying.)
Last week, on Capitol Hill, amid a sweltering late-spring heat wave, the Air-Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute set up food trucks, handing out ice-cream sandwiches. One Republican House member, Tom Kean, had been mysteriously absent for almost three months; even though he was in the middle of a reëlection campaign, nobody could find him. Amid G.O.P. criticism of the weaponization fund, Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, sent Congress home early. Trump seemed to be focussed on another murky fund—the billion-dollar one for “security enhancements” related to his new ballroom project. (“They just kind of made that number up,” Senator Bill Cassidy said.) Trump at times seemed impassive on the anti-weaponization fund—when asked about it, he said, “I know very little about it, I wasn’t involved in the creation.” Meanwhile, he ordered John Thune, the Senate Majority Leader, to fire the Senate Parliamentarian after she ruled that Republicans couldn’t tuck the ballroom funding into a budget bill. Trump already had everything he wanted from the weaponization fund; its creation was just one component of his family’s settlement with the I.R.S., in which they would be permanently shielded from tax audits based on old returns. Once again, he would have immunity as his supporters await their verdicts.
“If I had to bet, I’d say it’s ill-conceived and will not survive,” an Administration official told me, of the anti-weaponization fund. “I don’t know the details of the scheme. My sense is entirely based on optics and the vibe of them.” (The fund’s exact amount is $1.776 billion, a reference to the year of America’s founding.) “But optics can also get you pretty far,” the official added. Morss, the January 6th defendant, told me, “We’re at that age in a nation’s time line where, around the two-hundred-and-fifty-year mark, a country can either die off or have a renaissance where they reintroduce and reëxamine what made them great in the first place, what put them on the map in the first place. And so we’re due for an American renaissance.” ♦
