Could Donald Trump prosecute his political enemies if he's reelected?

Throughout his career as both a business mogul and political whirlwind, Donald Trump has never made secret his love of revenge. "Get even with people," he said to attendees at the 2011 National Achievers Congress in Sydney, Australia. "If they screw you, screw them back 10 times as hard."

"I really believe it," he added, as if putting to rest any doubts about his commitment to vengeance. 

But while retribution has served as Trump's guiding light for the bulk of his time in the public eye, his calls to use it against a host of perceived enemies and persecutors have increased in recent months. The former president now faces his first criminal conviction and the possibility that he may spend time inside a jail cell. "It's a terrible, terrible path that they're leading us to," Trump said in an interview with the conservative Newsmax network this week. "It's very possible that it's going to have to happen to them." While Trump's threats of using the office of the presidency to target his political adversaries are not in and of themselves new, they and their echoes across conservative media come with "renewed intensity since a New York jury delivered its guilty verdict" last month, CNN said. 

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Should Trump win reelection in November, would he truly pursue punitive reprisals against his political foes? And if he does make good on his many longstanding threats, what would that look like? 

What did the commentators say?

Trump has positioned political revenge as a "central part of his presidential campaign," Axios said. In part, that includes his previous suggestion that he might "install a special prosecutor to investigate [President Joe] Biden if he returns to the White House." He has also told his inner circle of advisors and friends that he would like the Department of Justice to "investigate specific former aides and allies who are now critical of him" in a second term, The Washington Post said. 

Among Trump's allies, the "intensity of anger and open desire" to politicize the criminal justice system for his personal agenda "surpasses anything seen before" during his time in office, The New York Times said. That intensification is manifested in the "range of Republicans who are saying retaliation is necessary and who are no longer cloaking their intent with euphemisms." For the immediate time being and without control of the White House, conservatives close to Trump are "urging district attorneys and attorneys general in red states to start aggressively targeting Democrats for unspecified crimes," the Times said. 

"Is every Republican D.A. starting every investigation they need to right now?" longtime Trump advisor Stephen Miller said on Fox News after Trump's Manhattan conviction. "There are dozens of ambitious backbencher state attorneys general and district attorneys who need to 'seize the day' and own this moment in history," said former Trump advisor Steve Bannon in a statement to the Times. 

"Time for Red State AGs and DAs to get busy," sitting Congressman Mike Collins (R-Ga.) said on X. 

All this "dovetails with a massive plan of action" led by the right-wing Heritage Foundation through its Project 2025 initiative, CNN said. In this plan, should Trump be reelected, the Justice Department would "no longer be treated as an independent body making decisions based on law" and instead "would come under 'the direct supervision and control of the President.'"

What next? 

Although there is a "history of Republicans prosecuting Democrats and vice versa," Rep. Glenn Ivey (D-Md.) is "relatively confident that these cases will continue to be resolved by jurors who come to the jury box taking their job seriously and trying to follow the evidence and the law," The Associated Press said. 

Still, Republicans in Congress have already begun using their House majority to set the stage for future retribution against many of Trump's supposed enemies. One day after his guilty verdict in the Manhattan hush money trial, the House Judiciary Committee chair proposed an "appropriations package that would 'defund the lawfare activities' of state and federal prosecutors leading 'politically sensitive investigations,'" Fox News Digital said. 

While it is unclear whether a reelected Trump and his allies could make politically motivated charges stick, "at the very least, they'd be able to make his opponents' lives very uncomfortable, a victory on its own," said The Washington Post.