With Orders, Investigations and Innuendo, Trump and G.O.P. Aim to Cripple the Left
Mr. Trump and his allies are aggressively attacking the players and machinery that power the left, taking a series of highly partisan official actions that, if successful, will threaten to hobble Democrats' ability to compete in elections for years to come.
So far, the attacks have been diffuse and sometimes indiscriminate or inaccurate. But inside the administration, there are moves to coordinate and expand the assault.
A small group of White House officials has been working to identify targets and vulnerabilities inside the Democratic ecosystem, taking stock of previous efforts to investigate them, according to two people familiar with the group's work who requested anonymity to describe it.
Scott Walter, president of the conservative watchdog group Capital Research Center, which monitors liberal money in politics, recently briefed senior White House officials on a range of donors, nonprofit groups and fund-raising techniques. The White House group is said to be exploring what more can be done within the law.
It is not unusual for partisans in Congress or their outside allies to push for investigations into political groups on the other side of the aisle.
But using the levers of government to target the opposition has long been considered an abuse of power, sometimes leading to prosecution. Mr. Trump himself was impeached in 2019 for pressuring the Ukrainian government to investigate the Bidens.
Mr. Trump's continued willingness to defy that norm — including in a grievance-filled speech at the Justice Department on Friday, during which he name-checked a litany of critics and called them 'horrible people,' 'thugs' or 'scum' — has Democrats sounding the alarm.
'The breadth is breathtaking,' said Cole Leiter, executive director of Americans Against Government Censorship, a coalition of progressive groups and labor unions created last year to defend against an anticipated Republican assault. Taken together, Mr. Leiter said, the efforts amounted to an attempt 'to cut the legs out from their opposition.'
It may 'sound conspiratorial,' Mr. Leiter added, 'but the reality is it's a sober description of what they're trying to do.'
Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, did not directly address the accusation that the administration's actions were aimed at crippling the left. 'The Democrats don't need President Trump to dismantle the Democratic Party,' he said in a statement. 'They are self-destructing with their radical policies.'
Undermining the left would amount to follow-through on Mr. Trump's campaign promises to seek 'retribution' against his perceived enemies.
The sentiment has been echoed and expanded upon by some of Mr. Trump's closest advisers.
The billionaire Elon Musk, the top Trump donor leading the administration's cost-cutting initiative, has appeared to encourage investigations of institutions that form the financial backbone of the left. They include ActBlue, the donation platform that helps fund virtually the entire Democratic Party and that congressional Republicans are already probing, and Arabella Advisors, a consulting firm that manages difficult-to-trace 'dark money' groups that collectively have spent billions of dollars helping Democrats and their causes.
'Something stinks about ActBlue,' Mr. Musk wrote March 7 in one of several social media posts about the platform. A day later, he claimed without evidence that ActBlue was funded by Democratic megadonors including Herb Sandler, who died in 2019.
(Megan Hughes, an ActBlue spokeswoman, denied that the group was funded by the people Mr. Musk named, living or dead. 'The only funders that ActBlue has are small-dollar donors that work sacrificially to fund worthy campaigns and causes,' she said in a statement.)
At the recent White House briefing, according to a person familiar with it, Mr. Walter presented research about ActBlue and major Democratic donors, leaving behind materials including copies of a book he published last year about Arabella.
Congressional officials say the Trump administration has signaled that it intends to throw its weight behind investigations of ActBlue in the House. And Senator Ted Cruz of Texas has suggested that ActBlue might have criminal exposure. He has also demanded documents from and threatened to subpoena another key company providing digital infrastructure for the left, Bonterra, which runs a crucial Democratic voter database system and supplies much of the party's organizing software.
Some of the president's allies have welcomed the moves as payback for Democratic congressional investigations of Mr. Trump and Republican political networks.
'Democrats ran breathless investigations of Republican dark money for years, and I hope that this is a concerted effort to go after the left's dark money,' said Mike Davis, a former Republican congressional aide who founded a group using what he calls brass-knuckle tactics to assail Mr. Trump's critics.
For now, Republicans are making wild claims about illegal activity at ActBlue with little to no evidence. But congressional Republicans believe the Trump administration will be far more cooperative in providing financial records to fuel their investigations than the Biden administration was.
'This is not a partisan issue,' said Jonathan Wilcox, deputy chief of staff for Representative Darrell Issa of California, 'and we're optimistic this Treasury Department will demonstrate a completely different commitment to public transparency and government oversight.'
Last week, several Republican lawmakers urged Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to investigate ActBlue or to help them do so. Mr. Issa sought information on claims that ActBlue had assisted groups accused of supporting terrorism. Representatives James Comer of Kentucky, Nick Langworthy of New York and Bryan Steil of Wisconsin requested reports about suspicious activity related to ActBlue.
The Treasury Department did not respond when asked if it was cooperating with the Republican congressmen.
But the terrorism accusation — even without evidence — is notable. A bill that passed the House over objections from most Democrats and many in the nonprofit world would have allowed the Treasury secretary to strip a charitable group of its tax-exempt status if it was deemed a 'terrorist-supporting' organization.
The F.B.I. declined to say if it was acting on a request last week by Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona for an investigation of whether ActBlue had allowed Democrats 'to skirt the integrity of federal campaign finance laws,' including by processing donations that originated in hostile foreign countries. But Kash Patel, the new F.B.I. director, a Trump loyalist, has reportedly expressed willingness to work aggressively to comply with Republican congressional oversight, and a close Trump ally predicted Monday at an event with Donald Trump Jr. that the F.B.I. would take action 'soon' on ActBlue.
The group has denied Republican claims of wrongdoing. Ms. Hughes said ActBlue was 'meeting this moment with the same resilience and determination that have fueled our work for decades.'
But Democrats worry that ActBlue may offer a harbinger of what's in store for other important Democratic institutions.
Mr. Musk last week highlighted a Fox News segment that accused the billionaire-backed groups managed by Arabella Advisors of falsely portraying themselves as a grass-roots resistance to Mr. Trump.
In an appearance on Mr. Cruz's podcast that was filmed inside the White House, Mr. Musk claimed that Arabella's groups and ActBlue were part of a 'left-wing N.G.O. cabal' that was organizing and funding protests of his electric automaker Tesla. He called the protests, which have included vandalism of Tesla dealerships and charging stations, 'terrorist activity,' and Mr. Cruz suggested it should be prosecuted.
Arabella said in a statement that it simply provided 'operational and administrative support to philanthropists and organizations' and that it did not 'have donors, make grants or engage in political activity.'
While some Republican students of left-wing political financing have been puzzled by Mr. Musk's claims, they are hoping to harness his interest to generate more sustained investigations by the Trump White House and Congress.
Mr. Trump himself appeared to call into question the charitable tax-exempt status of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, a Democratic-aligned watchdog group that has long been among the more aggressive litigants against him and is currently suing to force the release of records related to Mr. Musk's cost-cutting.
'CREW is a charitable organization, and that's a political thing,' Mr. Trump said on Friday at the Justice Department, singling out Norm Eisen, a former board member, as a 'vicious and violent' person who has 'been after me for nine years.' (Mr. Eisen's new group, State Democracy Defenders Fund, has also fought some of the new administration's actions in court.)
Jordan Libowitz, a CREW spokesman, declined to comment on Mr. Trump's mention of the group.
Personal grievance also figured heavily into directives Mr. Trump recently issued restricting access to government information and contracts for lawyers at firms associated with his critics.
The targeted firms include Perkins Coie, which was paid about $5 million by the Democratic National Committee and other party committees during the 2024 elections. It had earned Mr. Trump's ire by facilitating funding for since-discredited research on behalf of Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign and the D.N.C. into his team's dealings with Russia.
Covington & Burling, which received nearly $8.6 million from the D.N.C. and former Vice President Kamala Harris's campaign in the 2024 campaign cycle, was targeted by a presidential memorandum stripping security clearances from lawyers who represented Jack Smith, the former special counsel who pursued two separate indictments of the president in 2023.
The D.N.C. declined to comment on Mr. Trump's moves against the law firms and its vendors, including ActBlue.
A third law firm, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, was the subject of an executive order Friday restricting its business activities because one of its lawyers, Mark F. Pomerantz, had tried to build a criminal case against Mr. Trump several years ago when Mr. Pomerantz worked at the Manhattan district attorney's office.
Perkins Coie has lost 'significant revenue' as a result of the order, lawyers for the firm said in a lawsuit that prompted a judge to halt parts of the order.
On Friday, Mr. Trump singled out Mr. Pomerantz and Marc Elias, a former Perkins Coie lawyer who had been the firm's point person on the Russia research. Calling them 'radicals' and 'really bad people,' Mr. Trump confusingly claimed that the lawyers had 'tried to turn America into a corrupt Communist and third world country.'
On MSNBC afterward, Mr. Elias said, 'I'd be an idiot not to be worried.'
But he vowed to continue battling Mr. Trump. 'The question is not whether we are worried,' he said, adding, 'The question is what do we do.'
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