So many of the events and policies of the last three months of Donald Trump’s second presidency can be understood as downstream from one simple, Republican Party-wide organizing principle. That is, Trump aims to severely punish and brutalize his enemies, big and small, even if they didn’t do anything illegal or wrong — and he wants to wield the massive power of the state to do it, no matter how arbitrary or authoritarian his conduct.
In the middle of last week, the president notched yet another significant escalation in his government’s sprawling efforts to force this kind of American democratic backsliding. And due to the avalanche of other scandals, outrages, and international embarrassments perpetrated by his administration in recent days, that rather significant escalation was almost buried in the mainstream news cycle.
It wasn’t for Trump’s lack of trying, however.
On Wednesday, Olivia Troye was at her home working just like any other average weekday in Trump’s (second) America. Troye, then a Republican aide, had worked on Trump’s White House coronavirus task force during the hell-days of the pandemic, but later went public during the 2020 presidential election to campaign against Trump and warn voters that his mismanagement of the Covid-19 crisis was utterly disqualifying. During the 2024 campaign, she endorsed Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris, and continued to harshly criticize the fully Trumpist GOP.
She tells Rolling Stone that on Wednesday, “I was sitting at home working and suddenly my phone started blowing up, including from some former Trump administration officials. And someone messaged: ‘Turn on Fox News,’ and I got a text from someone else saying, “Oh my God, Miles.’”
When her husband walked in the room, Troye says he told her she looked “pale as a ghost — and he looked at the TV and could see why.”
She had reason to be worried. It’s currently unknowable if the second Trump administration will retaliate in any meaningful way against Troye, but during his first presidency, his White House cared enough about her to make her a target of its Two Minutes Hate, during the 2020 election and height of Covid-19.
Troye had been watching Wednesday’s live broadcast that the White House had convened for the media, with the president sitting at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, during which Trump was handed new executive orders to sign. In two of these documents, Trump ordered senior government officials, including Attorney General Pam Bondi, to investigate Miles Taylor, a former Trump Homeland Security official who wrote the famous Trump-trashing “Anonymous” op-ed and book, and Chris Krebs, who had been a top cybersecurity official who infuriated Trump and other Republicans by refusing to co-sign the then-president’s democracy-subverting lies that he had won the 2020 race against Joe Biden. The Department of Justice is then required to report the results of these investigations to the Trump White House.
In signing the orders on Wednesday, Trump told the cameras and the assembled press that “I think he’s guilty of treason,” referring to Taylor and — of course — citing zero evidence for such an egregious statement. Before signing the Krebs order, the president falsely insisted that it had been “proven” that Krebs was wrong, thus wielding the powers of the Executive Branch to cement the lie (which got people killed on Jan. 6, 2021) that Trump had won the 2020 presidential contest into Republican Party ideology and current federal policy. The president also used the televised moment to endorse carrying out further crackdowns on expanded voting rights, and also claimed that the U.S. political press is not “free,” presumably because it is too mean to him.
It is woefully unclear — which may be the point — what conceivable crimes these two men could have committed that would warrant publicly announced federal probes of them, specifically. It appears their primary offense was each pissing off Trump in the media by, particularly in Krebs’ case, stating demonstrably true things in the face of Trump’s efforts to steal an election he had clearly lost.
President Trump did not have to sign those executive orders on Wednesday. Trump — who was formerly criminally charged due to his attempted coup and other matters — and his White House staff could have privately directed the supposedly independent Justice Department to launch criminal investigations.
That still would be scandalous and represent a larger breakdown of the alleged independence of federal law enforcement in the United States. (To be fair, it is a breakdown that Trump explicitly promised the voters he would initiate, in a planned onslaught of political “retribution,” during his 2024 run.) But there is no reason that any executive order needed signing, much less a televised unveiling, for this to occur.
Trump and his lieutenants saw things a little differently.
“Donald Trump needed to send a message,” a White House official explains to Rolling Stone, adding that the public, executive-order-branded nature of it was in large part because Trump had said he wanted to deliver warning to others on his enemies list. “It’s true. He technically didn’t need to sign an E.O.”
Another Trump administration official adds that the president’s “showmanship qualities” practically necessitated, at least for this administration, a televised salvo of vengeance.
In doing so, the president ordered the Justice Department — which in his second administration has become little more than an incredibly powerful arm of his personal and political desires — to crack down and invasively probe two of his far less powerful political foes. He and his White House didn’t even bother with the patina of reasonable suspicion of any actual crime. They just blurt out terms like “treason” against the United States, which to President Trump can mean something as simple as: You hurt my feelings, therefore you must pay.
In other, recent, and more “normal” times, such brazen actions by the White House — shamelessly targeting, using vast federal resources, a pair of guys because they made the “king” mad — would be considered a massive scandal. These orders would be widely denounced, across mainstream partisan lines, as a blatant abuse of presidential power, and as the actions of an autocratic despot in some other nation, somewhere else, but not here in the land of the free.
But this is the new Trump era — and he has the backing of an entire political party that holds trifecta control of the federal government in Washington, along with their super-majority on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Krebs did not respond to Rolling Stone’s messages seeking comment. Taylor declined to comment, beyond what he had already posted to social media following Trump’s signing of the E.O.
“Dissent isn’t unlawful,” Taylor posted online. “It certainly isn’t treasonous. America is headed down a dark path. Never has a man so inelegantly proved another man’s point.”
The grim reality of Trump’s two for-show executive orders is that even if criminal prosecutions and imprisonment don’t ultimately transpire, the damage has already been inflicted.
“It works! Several people [I know] were saying they were worried about speaking out against Trump now even more so than they were before,” Troye says. “This is the stuff of a banana republic, where the government is directing investigations of outspoken critics. It’s about silencing people… It’s really scary when you say you’re going to use every lever of power of executive authority to target individuals. That is what happens in failed democracies. I wish more people would understand this, because I don’t think they do. It’s not about whether you agree with Miles Taylor or his politics, or if you disagree with what Chris Krebs did when he was doing his job. This is about everything we stand for as a democracy.”
She concludes: “If you don’t think it can happen to you, I hope people now realize that it can.”
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