The Weaponization of the Weaponization of Government

Donald Trump's push to investigate left-leaning groups in the wake of Charlie Kirk's assassination has quietly run into a wall of conservative opposition

From Gabe Kaminsky at the Free Press:

After conservative activist Charlie Kirk was killed in September, Donald Trump vowed retribution against groups that he said have done “tremendous damage to our country.” The president directed his administration to prosecute anyone engaged in political violence… Four months later, these pronouncements have clashed with reality. No widespread crackdown has arrived, and some outside allies of the White House have been left disappointed…

Meanwhile, the zeal to target liberals like [George] Soros has alarmed a growing number of wealthy conservative donors, who believe investigations could spur Democratic officials in a future administration to attack Republicans… The officials have also conceded to the donors that such inquiries cannot originate in the White House and must be launched at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) because of federal regulations... “If you weaponize government to serve your own purpose, it’s going to come back to bite you in the butt,” David Williams, president of the Taxpayers Protection Alliance… told me this week.

Racket readers know Kaminsky, who as a Washington Examiner reporter wrote a groundbreaking series called “Disinformation, Inc.” exposing funding of media blacklisting organizations by the Global Engagement Center, a wing of the State Department, since shut down in significant part thanks to his reporting.

Gabe’s new article describes concerns within the conservative world that Trump is becoming what he campaigned against. Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance promised to go after the “generous tax treatment” of “radical left lunatics” they say have fomented violence. If such investigations have to be launched by the IRS, any probe weighted toward the “lunatics” would automatically put the Trump White House in the same territory as one of the all-time conservative horror stories, the IRS targeting scandal in which Barack Obama’s revenue department disproportionately investigated Tea Party groups.

In September, after Trump signed a memorandum targeting “domestic terrorism and organized political violence,” Kaminsky ran a piece describing how Lawson Bader, the head of an influential conservative nonprofit called DonorsTrust, urged Trump to back off because such efforts threatened to “weaponize philanthropy” and could “come back to haunt us.” Now, Kaminsky has found more conservative donors and activists willing to go on record to echo Bader’s sentiments, or even venture beyond. Margaret Little of the New Civil Liberties Alliance expressed concern about White House officials using terms like “vast domestic terror movement” to describe nonprofits:

Blanket threats bring out the worst in the use of political power, mimic what the left has done for too many years, and don’t advance the purposes of getting us to a lawful nation that at least tries to respect people’s privacy rights, property rights, and associational rights.

An unnamed Republican congressman added, “They shouldn’t be going after them.” The piece also described how some conservative donors were concerned about future blowback, as in, “Hey, you’re going to kill us in four, eight years.”

Asked about the reaction to the article, Gabe said “there was a groundswell of figures in MAGA who were angry at the donor-class because they believe Republicans have been attacked for decades—and that the pledged investigations into political violence are legitimate.” He added: “Right-wing activists are also frustrated with some federal officials now, believing they have pumped the brakes on the investigations.” The latter sentiment was also in the report, with Oversight Project chief Mike Howell quoted as saying Trump officials are “just playing whack-a-mole.”

Hill Republicans I called mostly had little to add. One former congressional staffer said the donor complaints were illogical, because “blowback’s coming anyway. What matters is we were winning this issue,” implying that they aren’t now.

A year and a half ago, Trump’s promises to “obliterate the Deep State” and “go after” Joe Biden’s FBI were rallying cries for re-election. He framed his run as a symbolic counter-attack against a government “weaponized” against him, and by extension his followers. Trump even adopted the language of the defund movement after his indictment in Manhattan:

It’s forgotten, but this worked. The pre-2025 civil liberties picture of censorship, politicized prosecutions, and lawfare was so awful that Trump was swept into office by people who polls showed cared most about the issues, even if they shortly after changed their minds. None of this was reflected in legacy press, which depicted all Trump complaints about “weaponized” government as illegitimate threats against “perceived enemies” (a line that became nearly mandatory in reports by the New York Times, MSNBC, Politico, PBS, etc). Mainstream takes on Trump’s post-electoral excesses are the same, only worse. He was Hitler before, but now? Still Hitler. The nuance that post-electoral images of incinerated drug boats and masked ICE raids may be losing Trump support among independents or donors doesn’t appear.

It should. Take a group like the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which began criticizing institutions like Harvard long before Trump entered national politics. It’s now increasingly at odds with Trump over the same practices it’s always criticized when practiced by universities, the Biden administration, or the EU: imposing ideological litmus tests or speech codes, jawboning (in the FCC episode), punishing legal expression (e.g. threatening deportation over speech, flag-burning), and other problems. Will that register in mainstream coverage? Probably not, but if Kaminsky’s article is an indication, it will be an issue with donors next November.

At the end of another harrowing week, the headlines are amazing. Republicans and Democrats now parrot each other’s accusations of “weaponization” almost verbatim, but no longer appear to be aware of it. Take a New York Times story about four more Democratic lawmakers announcing that they’re under investigation for a video encouraging service members to resist illegal orders suggests editorial unfamiliarity with criminal sedition charges:

Mr. Trump and other administration officials have described the video, which restates a fundamental principle of military law, as “seditious.” But it is unclear what possible crime the lawmakers are believed to have committed.

Except, the Times breathlessly covered the idea that Trump and others were guilty of “seditious conspiracy” for years and ran countless primers on the law’s nuances (see here, here, here, here, etc). Meanwhile Trump supporters have been busy denouncing administration critics from Zohran Mamdani to Elissa Slotkin as “insurrectionists,” as if they don’t remember a hugely publicized effort to apply the tag to Trump, in hopes of removing him from the 2024 ballot. There’s no hesitation from Trump or Vance or Pam Bondi about using the term “domestic terrorist,” either, despite the fact that the term was as a pretext for a long list of actions against conservatives, incuding an Internet ban on QAnon. We may be in an endless weaponization cycle, from overreach to investigation to overreach, with no way out unless one side admits it. Who’d bet on that?