Trump 100 days: Retribution
Students, faculty and members of the Harvard University community rally, Thursday, April 17, 2025, in Cambridge, Mass. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)
Trump entered office pledging to bring “retribution” for his supporters.
He made good on that on his first day and virtually every week since, with actions taking aim at the prosecutors who investigated him and the law firms that employed them. He went after former officials who criticized him or asserted, correctly, that he had lost the 2020 presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden.
Trump ordered the suspension of the security clearances of the more than four dozen former intelligence officials who signed onto a letter during the 2020 campaign stating that the saga of Biden’s son Hunter’s laptop bore the hallmarks of a Russian influence campaign.
Trump’s Justice Department fired the prosecutors who investigated him as part of special counsel Jack Smith’s team and demanded the names of FBI agents who participated in investigations into the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.
Executive orders targeted some of the country’s elite law firms, in some cases because they employ or once employed prosecutors who investigated Trump. Those orders have sought to punish the firms by stripping the security clearances of their attorneys, barring them from federal buildings and terminating federal contracts.
Some firms have successfully sued to halt enforcement of key provisions of the orders, but even more have cut deals with the White House, agreeing to provide a combined hundreds of millions of dollars in free legal services to causes championed by Trump.
The nation’s top universities have not been spared, either.
The administration pulled $400 million in research grants and other funding for Columbia University over the school’s handling of protests against Israel’s military campaign in Gaza; Columbia agreed to changes demanded by the Trump team.
Some $175 million in federal funding for the University of Pennsylvania was suspended over a transgender swimmer who last competed for the school in 2022.
Harvard, which has $9 billion in government funding at stake, refused to comply with Trump’s demands. The administration responded by freezing grants and opening an inquiry about the university’s tax exempt status.
The president has singled out individuals, too. Presidential memos call for scrutiny of Miles Taylor, a former Department of Homeland Security official from the first Trump administration who has become a rump critic, and Chris Krebs, a former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency who angered Trump after he declared the 2020 election to be secure and the ballot counts to be accurate.
On Thursday, Trump extended his reach to ActBlue, a Democratic fundraising platform. He instructed the Justice Department to conduct an investigation.
