Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Getty Images
In his second-term drive to create a truly imperial presidency, Donald Trump is expanding many paths first blazed by his discredited predecessor, Richard Nixon. It’s no accident that Trump’s power-hungry budget director, Russell Vought, has championed the audacious Nixonian doctrine of unlimited presidential power to “impound” (i.e., refuse to spend) money appropriated by Congress. Trump’s insistence on personal diplomacy as the key to American power and world peace is reminiscent of the Nixon-Kissinger era of alliances made and unmade and wars launched and ended by secret presidential deals. And there’s even something of a Nixon cult in MAGA-land that treats the 37th president as a right-wing populist anti-hero who fought and lost a war against liberal elites and the “deep state.”
But perhaps the most significant parallel between Nixon and Trump is a grudge-driven rage toward enemies and a willingness to use government power to lash out at them. This was the essence of the Watergate scandal that brought Nixon down. The key difference is that while Nixon and his cronies sought to cover up their dirty tricks, Trump and his cronies seem to glory in them.
The latest Trump gambit to deploy the federal government against enemies real and imagined is right out of the Nixon playbook: weaponizing the IRS, as The Wall Street Journal reports:
The Trump administration is preparing sweeping changes at the Internal Revenue Service that would allow the agency to pursue criminal inquiries of left-leaning groups more easily, according to people familiar with the matter. …
The undertaking aims to install allies of President Trump at the IRS criminal-investigative division, or IRS-CI, to exert firmer control over the unit and weaken the involvement of IRS lawyers in criminal investigations, officials said. The proposed changes could open the door to politically motivated probes and are being driven by Gary Shapley, an adviser to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
Shapley has told people that he is going to replace Guy Ficco, the chief of the investigative unit, who has been at the agency for decades, and that Shapley has been putting together a list of donors and groups he believes IRS investigators should look at.
Back in 1974, the congressional Watergate investigation revealed a similar scheme undertaken by the Nixon White House to place Nixon allies in key positions at the IRS. The plan was, as White House counsel John Dean famously put it, to “use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.” Eventually, Dean and his associates put together an actual “enemies list” that grew to “hundreds of names, encompassing politicians, media figures, celebrities, labor leaders, activists, watchdog groups, scholars and businesspeople,” as one history of the episode explained.
While the plan was arguably Nixon’s dirtiest trick, it really never went very far thanks to resistance from the IRS itself (which valued its independence) and the need for secrecy. And even had it been implemented it appears the idea was to use the IRS to harass and embarrass anti-Nixon individuals and organizations, not to put them and their officers in the hoosegow. That’s why Trump’s apparent scheme stands out: It’s criminal prosecutions he’s after, and he feels no inhibitions about its blatant impropriety. Indeed, it’s an obvious follow-up to his claims that a left-wing conspiracy murdered Charlie Kirk and his threats to destroy this cabal via every available avenue.
Some Trump defenders will likely cite as precedent for weaponizing the taxman the alleged persecution of conservative groups by the IRS during the Obama administration, which is something of a right-wing legend. Indeed, early in the first Trump administration Attorney General Jeff Sessions forced the IRS to issue a formal apology for excessive scrutiny of a vast tide of applications for tax-exempt status that emerged alongside the rise of the Tea Party movement. But even if you buy the disputed premise of a witch hunt, the only weapon the IRS deployed was denial or questioning of tax-exempt status. Nobody was criminally prosecuted or threatened with prosecution. What Trump’s cooking up now is entirely different.
The IRS plan should be viewed as part of a broader weaponization initiative. It includes the Justice Department’s plans (very specifically demanded by Trump in a Truth Social post instructing Pam Bondi to expedite them) to investigate and criminally prosecute individuals on his own personal enemies list. And it may extend to Bondi’s own ambitions (very specifically encouraged by top presidential adviser Stephen Miller) to prosecute Trump critics for alleged incitement to violence. Even if the administration never moves beyond threats to unleash state power against the president’s foes (with the exception of targets already in their sights like James Comey, Letitia James, and John Bolton), it’s a nasty business made worse by a brazenness that would have made Richard Nixon green with envy.
