President Donald Trump is now using the federal government to go after people who hurt his feelings. That’s not my hot take, it’s just what’s happening.

On April 9th, he ordered formal investigations into two former officials, Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor. Not because they broke the law, but because they broke ranks, and committed the one truly unpardonable offense: contradicting Donald Trump.

Krebs led the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in 2020. After the election (and multiple official reviews) he publicly affirmed that the vote had been secure. So, of course, Trump fired him via tweet. And now, years later, Krebs is being dragged into a federal probe. Not for misconduct. Not for corruption or incompetence. But for contradicting the president. Some of his former colleagues might lose their security clearances too. The goal is to make an example out of anyone who steps out of line.

Taylor was a Homeland Security official. You might remember him as the guy who wrote that anonymous “I am Part of the Resistance” op-ed in The New York Times during Trump’s first term, about trying to contain the chaos from the inside. He followed it up with an anonymous book called A Warning, then went public. Now Trump is calling him a traitor. Literally. Not just in the usual “he’s a disloyal guy” sort of way. Trump actually used the word “treason,” which, for the record, carries the death penalty under U.S. law.

In the formal memoranda ordering the investigations, Trump’s team labeled Krebs a “significant bad-faith actor” and accused him of “weaponizing” government authority. Taylor, they said, “stoked dissension.” Not crimes, just challenges to the narrative. So when Taylor responded, he made it clear this wasn’t about legitimate wrongdoing:

“I said this would happen. Dissent isn’t unlawful. It certainly isn’t treasonous. America is headed down a dark path. Never has a man so inelegantly proved another man’s point.”

Taylor’s words cut to the core. These investigations are about retribution, not oversight. This is petty payback, laundered through executive orders and handed off to agencies now expected to play the role of enforcer. Trump isn’t hiding it. It’s all part of the plan. It’s loud on purpose and designed to intimidate anyone still clinging to the idea that facts might matter.

And it’s working.

Law firms that once challenged Trumpworld are now being pressured to “volunteer” legal services just to stay in the administration’s good graces. Some are folding. Hundreds of millions of dollars in free work, offered up not out of civic duty, but as protection, to avoid retaliation. That’s not how the legal system is supposed to operate, but it is how you buy silence, without ever having to say a word.

The blueprint is obvious. You punish dissent without ever needing a conviction, bury people in legal threats, name them, isolate them, and then let the harassment machine, both official and online, do the rest. It doesn’t matter if the charges get tossed out. By then, the damage is already done.

And no, this won’t stop with Krebs or Taylor. Because this isn’t just about these two individuals. Trump is setting a precedent and making sure that every journalist, every judge, every librarian and teacher, every federal worker—anyone who might be tempted to speak up knows exactly what it costs.

Of course, we’ve seen versions of this before. The McCarthy era smeared critics with accusations of disloyalty. COINTELPRO targeted activists and political groups under the banner of national security. But back then, at least there was some effort to preserve the illusion. Today? No secrecy needed. We have a president demanding loyalty in public, calling critics traitors, and turning federal agencies into blunt instruments of ego maintenance, with zero-fucking-interest in even pretending to cover his tracks.

What makes this moment even more dangerous is how performative it all is. The punishments are public and the threats are staged. And the autocratic behavior isn’t just tolerated. That would be bad enough, but it’s actually applauded. Celebrated by a base so thoroughly conditioned that revenge and pettiness have become currency. The longer we treat this as just another headline in a chaotic news cycle, the more normal it all begins to feel.

You don’t have to like Taylor or Krebs. You don’t have to agree with them. But if you’re okay with a president weaponizing the Department of Justice against people who contradict his narrative, or maybe just fail to clap loudly enough, you might want to ask yourself what democracy is supposed to mean.

Because once dissent is recast as disloyalty to the regime, the rest of the rules start to feel optional too. And when the rules are optional for those in power, they eventually become irrelevant for everyone else.

So let’s call this what it is. Not politics or procedural oversight or a misunderstanding of executive authority. It’s abuse. Loud, deliberate, dramatic abuse. And it’s also a warning to anyone who still believes criticizing the president isn’t grounds for persecution.

Nick Allison is a former Army infantryman, a college dropout, and a writer based in Austin, Texas. A center-left political independent with a distrust of all ideologies (including his own), Nick spends too much time reading about history, democracy, and systems in collapse—and not nearly enough time being optimistic about any of it. He writes about politics, culture, and philosophy mostly as a way to make sense of the mess. Also, he secretly enjoys writing his own bio in the third person—probably because it makes him feel a little more important than he actually is.