The disturbing thread that ties together Trump's major moves so far

Vox

28-03-2025

is a senior politics correspondent at Vox, covering the White House, elections, and political scandals and investigations. He's worked at Vox since the site's launch in 2014, and before that, he worked as a research assistant at the New Yorker's Washington, DC, bureau.
Perhaps the biggest common theme of Donald Trump's second term is that his administration has aggressively used federal power to punish those deemed to be its — or his — enemies.
Some foreign students who criticized Israel have had their visas revoked and have been whisked into ICE detention.
Venezuelan nationals with tattoos — some likely members of a foreign gang, some likely not — have been deported to El Salvador and imprisoned there.
Major law firms that displeased Trump have been hit with executive orders aimed at driving their clients away and destroying their businesses.
Elite universities that were the site of protests or had policies the administration dislikes have seen hundreds of millions of dollars in research funding revoked.
Related A longtime target of the right is finally buckling under Trump pressure
It's a frightening turn for American governance. Trump and the hard-right appointees who staff this new administration seem intent on ruining the lives of the people they've deemed enemies of the state, punishing them with state power.
Trump officials are punishing enemies first — with no process or fairness beforehand
What sets much of this apart is that there is no semblance of process or fairness before any of these decisions are made.
Detentions, executive orders, and funding revocations come first — as do deportations, if the administration can get away with them.
After that, powerful institutions can possibly, with sufficient bowing and scraping, get these harsh actions rolled back (as the law firm Paul Weiss did and as Columbia University is trying to do). Less powerful people can only hope to sue in court and hope a judge will help them.
This lack of process beforehand makes it more likely that innocent people are wrongly swept up. But Trump officials don't seem to mind.
In their rush to deport Tren de Aragua members to El Salvador before the courts could stop them, they don't seem to care that they scooped up a gay Venezuelan makeup artist. In their zeal to revoke visas of 'antisemitic,' 'Hamas-supporting' foreign students, they don't seem to care that they may have detained a PhD student for co-writing op-eds in a campus newspaper.
Trump set the tone, but his appointees are enthusiastically participating
Trump and his MAGA true-believer appointees are clearly personally responsible for many of these policies aimed at their purported enemies. But more broadly, he's set an ethic that's pervaded the administration, even those who are less overtly allied with his movement.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, for instance, bragged Thursday that he was personally responsible for revoking visas of hundreds of anti-Israel protestors. 'We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas,' he said.
Another telling anecdote came out of the Social Security Administration, currently run by acting appointee Leland Dudek — a career SSA official who decided to work with Elon Musk's 'Department of Government Efficiency' team and was then promoted to head the agency.
Earlier this month, the agency canceled a contract that allowed parents of newborns in Maine to get Social Security numbers for their new babies at the hospital. After criticism, the decision was reversed, but a mystery remained about why it happened at all. Was it a screw-up? Or was it deliberate punishment of Maine's people because of a frosty public exchange between Trump and the state's Democratic governor, Janet Mills? (Trump had threatened Mills with revoking federal funding over the state's policies on trans athletes, to which Mills responded, 'See you in court.')
It was indeed payback aimed at Mills, Dudek admitted to the New York Times last week. 'I was ticked at the governor of Maine for not being real cordial to the president,' he said, while acknowledging, 'I screwed up.'
Dudek wasn't even a longtime Trump crony (as seen in his willingness to actually admit screwing up). And if his account is correct, no one ordered him to target Maine. He just felt it was the appropriate thing to do when someone was rude to Donald Trump.
There's likely more to come
Though US citizens can't be summarily deported or ordered to leave the country, they can be retaliated against in other ways. For instance, Trump has long been clear about his desire to target his critics or political enemies with criminal prosecutions — but, unlike in his first term, he's appointed people like FBI director Kash Patel and interim US Attorney for the District of Columbia Ed Martin, who seem eager to actually make that happen.
An attempt by Martin to have Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer criminally investigated for comments he made in a speech flopped, but Martin has moved on to new targets.
One of those targets is Andrew Weissmann, who was a top prosecutor in special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation of Trump's ties to Russia, before becoming an MSNBC commentator. Earlier this month, Martin sent a threatening letter to Weissmann, demanding information about a decade-old matter he'd worked on at the Justice Department and alluding to impropriety. This seems like an obvious pretext for targeting Weissmann because he is an enemy of Trump.
Further targeting of blue states through withholding of federal funds is likely coming too, as seen in, for instance, Trump's executive order on elections this week.
Legal experts have said that Trump's revocation of funds in some cases — like the $400 million in grants to Columbia University he canceled — seems flatly illegal. But many targeted institutions have been reluctant to sue in court, fearing even worse retribution.
The problem is, though, that if this tactic keeps 'working' for Trump, he'll just keep using it, in even more dubious or unlawful ways.
Indeed, it's been startling how many institutions — corporations, elite law firms, and universities — have caved to Trump's pressure already. When will it stop? Will it stop?