LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN
August 22, 2025
Heather Cox Richardson
Aug 23, 2025
In these last days of August, with Congress on hiatus and the Epstein files looming, the Trump White House appears to be making a big move to consolidate power over the federal government, weaponize it against Trump’s opponents, and keep him in power indefinitely.
At around 7:00 this morning, FBI agents searched the home and office of Trump’s former national security advisor John Bolton, who has been a fierce critic of Trump since leaving his first administration. Officials told reporters the search was part of an investigation into whether Bolton illegally retained classified information or leaked it to news media. But as J.V. Last of The Bulwark noted, an investigation into classified documents from several years ago—as opposed to a search of, say, a drug dealer—would normally mean the government officials would have a conversation with Bolton’s lawyers and arrange for a routine search to which Bolton agreed. Instead, agents stormed his house and office in an early morning raid.
The raid seems a pretty clear warning to those Trump perceives as enemies that he will bring the full weight of the United States government to harass them. Bolton has been a thorn in Trump's side for years because he is a well-known right-wing figure who has not been shy about speaking out against Trump. As recently as last week, Bolton told CNN that Trump had “achieved very little” by meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin in Alaska, and that “Putin clearly won.” He also noted that Trump “looked tired.”
Earlier this month, when ABC’s Jonathan Karl asked Bolton if he was worried Trump would come after him as part of the president’s “retribution campaign” being waged through the FBI and the Department of Justice. Bolton pointed out that Trump had already come after him by removing his Secret Service protection despite specific Iranian threats against his life. Bolton added: “I think it is a retribution presidency.”
Targeting Bolton has been a goal of FBI director Kash Patel, whom Trump appointed after Patel made it clear he intended to use the power of government against Trump’s opponents. “We’re going to come after you whether it’s criminally or civilly,” Patel said in 2023 on Trump associate Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast.
Indeed, Trump loyalist Attorney General Pam Bondi has launched criminal investigations into Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA), who led the House Intelligence Committee that broke the story of Trump’s phone call to Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky asking him to smear Trump’s 2020 political opponent Joe Biden; New York Attorney General Letitia James, who successfully sued Trump and the Trump Organization for fraud; and now Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, who suggested on August 6 that the revision of the last few months’ jobs numbers might signal a turning point in the economy.
Those investigations come after another Trump loyalist, William Pulte, who heads the Federal Housing Finance Agency, alleged that the three committed mortgage fraud years ago. All three have denied the allegations, and Allan Smith, Steve Kopack, and Dareh Gregorian of NBC News note that accusation of mortgage fraud “has long been a common tactic in opposition research on political campaigns. James’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, pointed out that the administration does not appear to be investigating Trump loyalist Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general who, divorce filings released this July show, claimed three different properties as his primary residence, thus securing lower-interest mortgages on them.
Earlier this week, bodycam footage released from a court filing by Representative LaMonica McIver (D-NJ), whom the administration has charged with assaulting federal agents during the chaotic arrest of Newark, New Jersey, mayor Ras Baraka on May 9, shows that the Justice Department’s deputy attorney general Todd Blanche personally ordered Baraka’s arrest. The case was later dismissed.
And yet Trump loyalists are not just targeting people in order to intimidate opponents. They seem determined to rewrite history to suit Trump.
In July the Department of Justice launched investigations of former FBI director James Comey and former CIA director John Brennan, alleging they had made false statements to Congress about the investigation into the attempt by Russian operatives to help Trump’s 2016 candidacy. After all these years, Trump continues to come back to the scandal that he calls “Russia, Russia, Russia.”
Yesterday, Russia bombed a U.S. factory in Ukraine, wounding at least 15 people, and today, Russian officials made it clear they would not even entertain the bilateral summit with Ukraine Trump called for. Nonetheless, today in a bizarre session in the Oval Office, at what was supposed to be an announcement about next year’s FIFA World Cup, wearing a cap with the words “Trump Was Right About Everything,” Trump showed reporters a photograph of himself and Putin that Putin had sent him from their meeting in Alaska last week, and expressed sadness that Putin, who has murdered more than a million people and is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, can’t attend the FIFA games. Trump said he planned to sign the photograph as a gift for Putin.
The administration’s crusade against the U.S. intelligence agencies that uncovered the relationship between Russian operatives and Trump’s 2016 campaign is continuing as part of the administration’s power grab. On Wednesday, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard announced she will cut 40% of her office, with cuts coming from the Foreign Malign Influence Center, which, as Maggie Miller and Dana Nickel of Politico note, “collects and analyzes data on foreign influence operations seeking to undermine U.S. democracy.”
Today Hegseth fired the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, U.S. Air Force Lt. General Jeffrey Kruse. The Defense Intelligence Agency provides intelligence to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and to U.S. military personnel in the field.
The crackdown in Washington, D.C., seems to have far less to do with combating crime in a city where crime rates are at a 30-year low than it does with demonstrating that the administration controls the capital, the seat of the U.S. government. As conservative lawyer George Conway, who helpfully videoed the FBI raid on John Bolton’s house this morning, put it: “If you want to have a coup against the constitutional order, you want to control the capital city. And if he has control of the policing in the city of Washington,... how do you stop him? Who's gonna tell him to leave the White House?"
Trump has rewarded those who fought to steal the 2020 election for him, pardoning or commuting the sentences of more than 1,500 people convicted or charged in connection with the January 6, 2021 riot designed to stop the counting of the electoral votes that would make Biden president, and yesterday he demanded that Colorado officials release former election officer Tina Peters, whom a jury found guilty of four felonies for breaching election equipment to supporte Trump’s lies about election fraud after that election. Trump posted on social media: “She did nothing wrong, except catching the Democrats cheat in the Election [sic]…. If she is not released, I am going to take harsh measures!!!”
Now Trump and his allies appear to be cementing control of the capital. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said in a statement today from the Pentagon that the 2,000 National Guard members stationed in Washington, D.C., will begin to carry weapons. More National Guard personnel are on the way. At the same time, FBI Director Patel and deputy director Dan Bongino appear to be turning the FBI into a national police force: dropping the requirement for a college degree, reducing training hours, and focusing on street crime rather than the bureau’s traditional expertise in white collar crime, corruption, and so on.
Trump said yesterday he wants to extend the deployment for more than the 30-day limit the law allows, and today he warned that he would take over the city “with the federal government.” Today, in the Oval Office, Trump told reporters that his administration would invade Chicago, which he called a “mess,” next. He said that “African American ladies, beautiful ladies, are saying, ‘Please, President Trump, come to Chicago, please.’”
On August 18, Democracy Docket’s Marc Elias warned that Trump is “stationing the military and other federal law enforcement in blue areas so—when the time comes—he can pivot their mission to suppressing voting rights and undermining free and fair elections.” On Tuesday, Trump ally Steve Bannon said on his webcast War Room: “They're petrified over at MSNBC and CNN that, hey, since we’re taking control of the cities, there's going to be ICE officers near polling places. You damn right.”
Last March, scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder wrote that those who fantasize about a strongman make the terrible mistake of thinking “that a strongman will be your strongman. He won't,” Snyder wrote. “In a democracy, elected representatives listen to constituents. We take this for granted, and imagine that a dictator would owe us something.” But he doesn’t, Snyder explains: your support makes you irrelevant.
Those who supported Trump from a belief that he would protect American business from state interference received yet another example of Snyder’s point today when Trump boasted that the government has taken a 10% stake in Intel, which builds semiconductors and chips. Trump says he intends to take similar stakes in other companies.
In the midst of the day’s firestorm of news, the administration released several pieces of the transcripts of Todd Blanche’s interview with Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell. In them, she is recorded as saying, among other things: “[A]s far as I'm concerned, President Trump was always very cordial and very kind to me. And I just want to say that I…admire his extraordinary achievement in becoming the president now. And I like him, and I've always liked him.”
Trump apologist lawyer Jonathan Turley suggested the Maxwell interviews would lay the story of the Epstein files to rest. But the interviews were always a distraction from the Epstein files themselves. Prosecutors at the Department of Justice itself called Maxwell a serial liar, and as Erica Orden, Josh Gerstein, and Kyle Cheney of Politico note, she is now angling for a pardon after her conviction on sex trafficking charges.
In Illinois today, Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson called Trump’s threat to take over the city an illegal abuse of power.
On X, Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker posted: “Things People are Begging for: 1. Cheaper groceries 2. No Medicaid and SNAP cuts 3. Release of the Epstein Files.” He added: “Things People are NOT begging for: 1. An authoritarian power grab of major cities.”
LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
