He has some nerve…
With all this tiresome whining about how “the left” and the Democrats are weaponizing the government against Donald Trump and his followers, it’s important to remember who’s the real weaponizer:
Former President Donald J. Trump has regularly railed against a justice system that he contends has been deployed against him by his political opponents.
“The Biden regime’s weaponization of our system of justice is straight out of the Stalinist Russia horror show,” he told a rally in Texas on Saturday night.
But as is often the case with Mr. Trump, his accusations — widely repeated by other Republicans — reflect his own pattern of conduct: his history of threatening or seeking to employ the expansive powers of the presidency to go after his enemies, real and perceived.
“He was always telling me that we need to use the F.B.I. and I.R.S. to go after people — it was constant and obsessive and is just what he’s claiming is being done to him now,” said John F. Kelly, Mr. Trump’s second White House chief of staff.
“I would tell him why it was wrong, and while I was there I did everything I could to steer him away from it and tell him why it was a bad idea,” Mr. Kelly said. “I thought we were successful, but he would often ask a lot of people to do a lot of things that he didn’t want to do himself in the hopes that someone would do it and he could claim he did nothing wrong.”
Some of his demands were public, and to some degree a political performance, like his calls, never acted upon, for the prosecution of Hillary Clinton, his defeated rival in the 2016 campaign.
Other actions were personal, and more petty. He blocked then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi from using a military plane in 2019 to visit troops in Afghanistan. Andrew McCabe was temporarily denied his federal pension upon retiring as deputy director of the F.B.I., after intense criticism from Mr. Trump for his role in the Russia investigation.
In some instances, Mr. Trump acted more quietly and persistently. Among those he wanted to see prosecuted was John F. Kerry, the former senator, Democratic presidential nominee and secretary of state under President Barack Obama.
Mr. Trump maintained that Mr. Kerry had broken the law by staying in touch with Iranian officials with whom he had negotiated a nuclear deal that Mr. Trump was unwinding. As president, Mr. Trump repeatedly pressed senior officials behind closed doors about using the Justice Department to target Mr. Kerry, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Ultimately, federal prosecutors in New York were pushed by senior Justice Department officials in Washington to investigate Mr. Kerry, according to the U.S. attorney in Manhattan at the time.
John R. Bolton, who served as Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, said the former president is now clearly playing to a base that has increasingly embraced his claims of “weaponization” about a range of investigations, and responded to his portrayal of himself as its victim. But, Mr. Bolton said, “The idea that he’s a paragon of virtue who didn’t do this to other people and is now a victim of this unfairness really is laughable.”
Asked to comment about Mr. Trump’s use of the levers of power to go after his enemies, including Mr. Kerry, a senior consultant to Mr. Trump’s campaign, Chris LaCivita, spoke only of Mr. Kerry and reiterated the call for his prosecution, calling him “a threat to national security.”
For decades, Mr. Trump has generally viewed institutions and systems as entities that reward friends and allies of those leading them and that punish their enemies. It was how he perceived the world of machine politics that surrounded him in New York City as he was growing up. He has long made clear that he believes every system and every person is corruptible.
“Anyone will say anything if you pay them enough. I know that, and you know that,” the former C.I.A. director, John Brennan, recalled Mr. Trump saying at their first meeting, in reference to his distrust of human intelligence sources.
They’re trying to drive us crazy with this projection. Sometimes I feel like it’s working.