Revenge Death Spiral Politics Is Turning D.C. Into A Banana Republic

What is Washington, D.C., now, if not where the United States’ pettiest, most shameless egotists gather to seek revenge on each other?

On the heels of the Democrats’ historic midterm landslide last week, incoming House Oversight Committee Chairman Robert Garcia reiterated his vow “to take on the Trump Crime Family, corporate corruption, DHS and ICE abuses, and the cover-up of the Epstein files” before issuing a two-word warning to his opponents: “Lawyer up.”

The message was all the more foreboding for its lack of shock value. The past few weeks alone have seen a number of the most alarming symptoms of America’s ailing political culture flare up so intensely as to make one wonder if the underlying disease is terminal.

Professional blowhard Kara Swisher recently lamented Elon Musk’s continued freedom before hopefully predicting that the Democratic congressional majority that has since materialized might pick up where the Biden administration left off. Speaker-to-be Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) spent the lead up to Election Day calling it “Judgment Day.” Rep. Yassamin Ansari (D-AZ), another Democratic member of Garcia’s committee, told an excitable progressive crowd at the aptly named “Crooked Con” last week that “There is no reason why people cannot, and should not and will not go to jail for the crimes that they are committing.” She followed that up by, without any prompting, expressing her desire to investigate “people down the chain at the Pentagon” (i.e. service members) who might have carried out orders she didn’t approve of — an echo of the high-profile video featuring Senator Elissa Slotkin and other Democratic lawmakers warning the same group that they might be prosecuted for illegal orders they carry out at Trump’s behest. That isn’t the only authoritarian fantasy Slotkin harbors, either.

“I want young people coming out of school to say, ‘Should I go work for the Trump administration? Like, that sounds fun. I might get an opportunity.’ I want them to be like, ‘Lord, that might be buying myself a ton of problems that I don’t want. And so, let me avoid participating in that,’” the ambitious lawmaker told Vox’s Astead Herndon last month. “I want that deterrence message sent.”

Between all of this more recent saber-rattling – and the lionization of Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, and Fani Willis during the Biden interregnum – it’s clear that the Left doesn’t oppose the weaponization of government on principle. Indeed, they’ve just spent months campaigning on wielding government power against their enemies. Again.

But if anything, the Trump administration has granted them cover for their misdeeds with its own, less plausibly deniable campaign of retribution against the president’s enemies – as well as by providing a predicate for criminal investigations into it with its pervasive, brazen corruption.

Undeterred by a number of false starts in its pursuit of imprisoning James Comey, the incompetent, slimy former director of the FBI, the Department of Justice continues to try. Adam Schiff, Cassidy Hutchinson, Lisa Cook, and the aforementioned Letitia James – whatever their sins may be – are just a few more of the high-profile targets who have had the shadow of the executive branch hanging over them for explicitly political reasons over the last year. Moreover, while Slotkin, Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, and the other Democrats who participated in the “illegal orders” video disgraced themselves by doing so, Trump was not to be outdone. After publicly calling for Slotkin and Kelly to face charges “punishable by DEATH,” his DOJ once again attempted – and once again failed – to prosecute them.

In the here and now, Trump shows no signs of backing down, even after the midterm shellacking he just suffered. On Sunday, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche took to the airwaves to respond to Democrats’ threats in kind. And senior Trumpologist Maggie Haberman has revealed that the president’s decision to move on from Susie Wiles and install “wartime consigliere” Stephen Miller as his chief of staff was motivated, at least in part, by the impotence of his revenge tour, which Miller is, by all available indications, a champion of.

There’s no understating the staggering scope and disturbing implications of the problem: Payback is now an accepted, even celebrated, spoil of political war, and the foreseeable consequence of this trend is a death spiral that will tear the country apart.

If every election is not just a referendum on what should be done, but who should go to jail, the enmity will deepen, and the reprisals will be harsher. The American people have now rejected lawfare – in all its various forms as carried out by and against both the Right and the Left – twice in two years, first in November 2024 and then again last week.

Voters have made it abundantly clear that there will be no ultimate victory for one side that sees the other permanently vanquished; only the shared misery of two myopic, tribal elite classes and a people disserved by them. What matters now is not their grievances, real or imagined, nor the punishment they imagine for their tormentors, but that they listen to the public that is, in their wisdom, standing athwart the carnage yelling, “Stop!”

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Isaac Schorr is a staff writer at Mediaite and a 2023–2024 Robert Novak Journalism Fellow at the Fund for American Studies.