Trump's revenge summer heats up with Fed ouster, Bolton raid

Welcome to Donald Trump’s summer of revenge.

The president is following through with his promise to rain retribution on political opponents. But his wrath has also extended throughout nearly every corner of his government, targeting those who might dare to complicate his agenda.

In recent weeks he’s stripped security clearances, launched investigations, used social media threats to intimidate adversaries — and even fired officials from agencies that operate independently from the executive branch.

When the Federal Bureau of Investigation raided the home of Trump’s former national security adviser-turned-critic John Bolton last Friday, it smacked of an escalation, even though the president denied he was personally involved and administration officials have said there are legitimate concerns about Bolton’s handling of classified material.

Trump’s move to oust Federal Reserve Gov. Lisa Cook was seen by critics as a direct attack on the central bank itself. While administration officials cast the decision as targeted at one governor over allegations she falsified mortgage applications, the president noted that getting rid of her would hand him a majority on the Fed board, which he has long excoriated for declining to lower interest rates. Cook has generally voted with Chair Jerome Powell, a Trump bogeyman, to keep rates steady.

Both moves were extraordinary; no president since Richard Nixon has used his powers to go after perceived foes in such a sweeping manner. They also make clear that Trump’s pledge to pursue vengeance was not just campaign-trail bombast. Instead, after years of what he saw as politically motivated investigations and prosecutions into him and his supporters, he’s tearing down anyone standing in his way.

“It’s meant to send a wide message to people in the administration,” said presidential historian Doug Brinkley. “But I also think it comes from a genuine wellspring of anger and rage that he had to endure Stormy Daniels and the Mar-a-Lago raid and the Georgia election tape.”

White House spokesman Davis Ingle said Trump’s “only retribution is success and historic achievements for the American people.”

“Joe Biden weaponized his Administration to target political opponents – most famously, President Trump,” Ingle said in a statement. “President Trump is restoring integrity to our government. Anyone who engages in criminal activity should be held accountable. No one is above the law.”

Trump this week also ended Secret Service protection of his 2024 opponent, former Vice President Kamala Harris. Typically, protection for a former vice president lasts six months after leaving office, but President Joe Biden extended Harris’ detail through July 2026, a person familiar with the plans said.

Trump is using the tools of his retribution drive to target government officials seen as impeding his agenda.

The White House fired U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Susan Monarez just weeks into her tenure, following a confrontation with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over vaccine policy. Trump has long railed against the nation’s public health apparatus over the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, which fueled his 2020 presidential loss. He installed Kennedy, a vaccine skeptic, to make drastic changes to the country’s health institutions.

He also moved to ax a Democratic federal railroad regulator as his administration weighs a historic merger between Norfolk Southern Corp. and Union Pacific Corp. The official had opposed a previous merger.

And earlier this month, Trump fired the Biden-appointed head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after a poor July jobs report and nominated a loyalist as a replacement.

Trump’s efforts haven’t stopped there. The president has threatened investigations into Chris Christie, the former Republican New Jersey governor and one-time supporter, and billionaire Democratic donor George Soros and his sons. The next targets of his federal crime crackdown may be cities and states run by potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidates, Trump has said.

His team has also launched probes into Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff of California, who led Trump’s first impeachment trial in the House, and into New York Attorney General Letitia James, who won a civil fraud verdict against Trump’s company. And the Justice Department has opened an investigation into the federal inquiry of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, which Trump has dismissed as a “hoax.”

The White House has said its moves are justified and meant to ensure those in government are aligned with Trump’s agenda.

And one White House official disputed the idea that Trump’s behavior amounted to a pattern of retribution, arguing that Cook was accused of mortgage fraud, Monarez was not aligned with administration priorities and that Harris had received the same amount of protection as previous vice presidents. The official also asserted that many of the Democrats who had come in for Trump’s ire had been equally combative toward him.

“If you are executing on the vision and the promises that the president made to the public who elected him back to this office, then you should have no fear about your job,” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Thursday.

Some allies had sought to persuade Trump that seeking revenge would impede other parts of his agenda. Television personality Phil McGraw told Trump in a June 2024 interview that “you don’t have time to get even” because “you have so much to do.”

“Well, revenge does take time. I will say that. And sometimes, revenge can be justified, Phil. I have to be honest,” Trump responded.

Now, there are few signs that anyone in power is willing to rein in Trump.

The Republican-led Congress has largely fallen in line with his actions, leaving the court system as the one check on his authorities. While some judges have ruled against Trump, the Supreme Court has sided with him on several key issues, letting him discharge transgender people from the military, fire top government officials, cut grant payments and open hundreds of thousands of migrants to deportation.

“This is within six months, further than many people imagined. The attempt on Lisa Cook is a next-level attack not just on the Fed, but for the Supreme Court,” said Jed Shugerman, a professor at Boston University School of Law.

No president has previously tried to fire a member of the Fed board, a move that strikes at the heart of the central bank’s independence and could spook investors.

The high court signaled in a ruling earlier this year that it would shield the Fed from the type of at-will removals of board members Trump has undertaken at other independent federal agencies, but Cook’s lawsuit challenging her ouster will put that to the test.

While Trump has pushed the boundaries of his powers, his opponents have at times done the same. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s hush-money prosecution of Trump “backfired in several ways already and could continue to reverberate as an example of partisan prosecutorial abuse,” Shugerman argued.

Trump’s promises of payback have been brewing for years. He continues to rail against the Russia investigation, which did not result in charges against Trump or his top associates for conspiring with Moscow’s election interference efforts.

After his 2020 election loss, Trump faced four criminal prosecutions over accusations he sought to interfere with the peaceful transfer of power, kept classified documents in Florida, directed election interference in Georgia and committed business fraud in New York. He denied all the charges and told supporters the cases were politically motivated. “I’m being indicted for you,” Trump would say at rallies.

Trump has insisted he is not weaponizing the federal government by looking into the mortgage records of Cook, Schiff and James. But he also acknowledged that forcing out Cook — a Biden appointee — would make four of the seven seats on the Fed’s board his appointees.

“It’s going to be great. People are paying too high an interest rate,” he said on Aug. 26.

Cook’s suit has portrayed Trump’s move to fire her as a power grab that could destabilize the U.S. economy. It disputed the mortgage-fraud allegations and described them as pretext to get rid of her, after Trump stopped short of following through on threats to terminate Powell.

Trump has been targeting Bolton for some time. In the early days of his second term, Trump pulled the security details protecting Bolton and several other former officials who broke with the president. The former adviser had been the target of an alleged assassination campaign by Iran over his role in the 2020 killing of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Qassem Soleimani.

The raid appeared to be linked to a federal inquiry into whether Bolton retained or disseminated classified documents. During Trump’s first term, prosecutors had investigated Bolton over his tell-all 2020 memoir, "The Room Where It Happened," which detailed Bolton’s belief that Trump was unfit for the presidency. Trump accused Bolton of using classified information in the book and sued unsuccessfully to block publication.

“He’s already come after me and several others in withdrawing the protection that we had,” Bolton recently told ABC News. “I think it is a retribution presidency.”