Former President Trump has been growing increasingly angry at Democrats, even while the legal cases he pushed to punish his political opponents continue to collapse around him. A legal expert points out that Trump’s entire campaign of revenge is falling apart for a simple reason: he tried to bend the legal system to his will, and now the system is snapping back on him.
Recently, Trump erupted over a video released by Democrats encouraging members of the military to refuse “illegal orders.” The message bothered him so much that he pressured his own Defense Secretary to launch an investigation into one of the Democrats involved, Senator Mark Kelly. Kelly isn’t just a senator—he’s a former Navy captain—and the idea that Trump would try to drag someone like him into an investigation shows how far Trump is willing to go to strike at people he sees as critics or threats.
But Trump’s frustration didn’t end there. His attempt to use federal prosecutors to go after former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James hit a major roadblock. A judge threw out those cases entirely. The key reason was that Trump had installed a handpicked loyalist as U.S. Attorney in an improper, illegal way, hoping that this person would do his bidding and target the people Trump wanted to punish. Instead of giving Trump the victories he wanted, this illegal appointment ended up destroying the cases. The judge’s ruling made clear that Trump’s shortcuts and political interference tainted the prosecutions from the start.
All of this shows a pattern: Trump keeps trying to turn the government and the justice system into tools for personal payback. He wants the system to harm his enemies, not serve the public. But by pushing so hard and cutting corners, he’s creating legal messes that boomerang back onto him. Each attempt to punish someone ends up exposing how improperly he has handled things, leaving him worse off than before.
Legal reporter David Kurtz from Talking Points Memo explains that Trump’s own behavior is the core problem. The chaos, the failed prosecutions, the investigations launched in anger they’re all tied to Trump’s desire to use government power in ways it simply isn’t meant to be used. Kurtz also argues that once this period in American politics ends, the country will probably need a major overhaul of its laws and institutions something on the scale of the reforms that followed the Watergate scandal to prevent future presidents from misusing their authority the way Trump has.
The full conversation goes into how these events fit together, why Trump’s strategy keeps collapsing, and what it will take to repair the damage done to the system.
