I survived Trump’s revenge machine. This is how we destroy it

Democrats are quietly drafting a monumental overhaul of the presidency, and unfortunately, I’m one of the reasons why it’s necessary. On 9 April last year, Donald Trump sat down in the Oval Office and signed a piece of paper with my name on it. The memorandum stripped me of my security clearance and ordered the federal government to investigate me. As he signed it, he told reporters he thought I was guilty of “treason”, a crime punishable by death. Of course, my real offence was quitting his administration and speaking out about his penchant for corruption. The irony — of a man abusing his power to punish someone who warned that he’d abuse his power — was not lost on me. Trump’s order declared me guilty of several crimes, including having “illegally published classified conversations” … “stoked dissension”… “disclos[ed] information obtain[ed] through unauthorized methods” … “for personal enrichment” and which could be “properly characterized as treasonous” in “violation of the Espionage Act” – all of which is false, none of which any court has found or even considered and for which he prescribed punishment via executive order. I wasn’t the only one. The same afternoon, Trump signed a near-identical order against Chris Krebs, his former cyber security chief, whose sin was saying the 2020 election had been secure. In the days that followed, constitutional scholars started contacting me, and several made the same point. In nearly 250 years, no American president had ever put his signature to a written order directing the machinery of the state against a named private citizen for what he or she had said. Shorts J Michael Luttig, the retired conservative appeals court judge, put it bluntly. Targeting Chris and me for speaking out, he wrote, was “the President’s most constitutionally corrupt Executive Order to date”. There’s an old name for this type of misconduct. As top US legal scholars have written, it’s tantamount to what’s called a “bill of attainder”: a decree that declares a particular person guilty and punishes them, with no trial and no chance to answer the charge. English kings and their parliaments used attainders for centuries to destroy rivals and seize their estates, and the men who founded the United States had seen enough of it. Indeed, the Declaration of Independence criticised King George III for making “Judges dependent on his Will alone” and for “depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury”. When the US Constitution was written a decade later, the ban on bills of attainder passed unanimously, without debate. Yet Trump has effectively made use of the practise anyway. Then he kept doing it. His administration went on to blacklist universities, law firms, journalists, members of Congress, former officials and more. It stripped funding from universities including Harvard and Columbia, barred news outlets from the White House and published names of those who he would not allow to serve in his government. The pattern that began with a signature in April 2025 effectively became the operating system of his second term. So you might expect me to want the favour returned. Some of my friends certainly do. They want the next Democratic president to pick up the same pen on day one and sign orders directing the Justice Department to investigate Trump, his family and his enablers, by name, for alleged corruption. This would include allegations Trump supporters and firms linked to his sons received preferential treatment in securing contracts with the administration; claims Trump businesses were shielded from tax audits; and allegations around the sale of early access rights to his social media platform. Turn the weapon around. Let them find out how it feels. This isn’t just about Trump – no president should have the power to take revenge at will, writes Miles Taylor (Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty) I understand the appeal. And I reject it. That’s not to say I don’t think there should be investigations. But they should come about according to the rule of law, based on evidence of crimes — not because a president says someone is guilty first and investigates them second. If the next president can do to Trump what Trump did to me, then the one after that can do it to someone else, and the American presidency becomes a revenge machine that changes hands every four years. The lesson of the past two years isn’t that the wrong man got hold of this power. It’s that no one should have it, whichever party they belong to. That’s why the most important work in Washington right now is happening quietly. The Washington Post reported this week that Trump’s opponents are drawing up the most sweeping overhaul of the presidency since the Watergate scandal. This includes bills to rein in emergency powers, insulate the Justice Department from the White House, bar a president from taking foreign payments and more clearly outlaw the punishment of people for their speech. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, called it “a massive reconstruction task”. I’ve spent the past year working privately with members of Congress and their committees on this, and I can tell you the ambition goes well beyond what Congress did after Watergate in the 1970s. The other week, I sat down with Congressman Robert Garcia, who is likely to chair the Oversight Committee if Democrats win the House of Representatives in the midterm elections next month. That panel would lead the investigations into Trump and his circle, and Garcia didn’t hedge about where he would start. Early voting in Wheaton, Illinois. With weeks to go until the US midterm elections, Democrats are eyeing control of Congress (Photo: Kamil Krzaczynski/AFP) “The top single biggest priority is the Trump family,” he told me. “Where Jared Kushner is getting billions from the Saudis, where they’re enriching themselves through crypto, through selling pardons.” In the next breath, he said what I would’ve said. “That has to be investigated. And then we’ve got to put laws in place and legislation to prevent it in the future.” Garcia admitted that when Trump was re-elected he fell into “a deep state of despair” and thought “we could really lose our country.” He’s more hopeful now. “I can see the end of the Donald Trump presidency,” he said. “It’s going to take an enormous amount of commitment, dedication to rebuild, but I think we’re going to survive Donald Trump.” I also spoke with Congressman Jason Crow, a former Army Ranger who, like me, was personally targeted by the President. Crow and five fellow Democrats with military and intelligence backgrounds recorded a video last year reminding American service members that they’re obliged to refuse illegal orders. Trump declared their conduct “seditious behavior, punishable by death” and amplified a post calling for them to be hanged. His Justice Department tried to indict them. Then a grand jury threw the case out. Crow isn’t looking for instant payback, either. “I will put it all on the line to have the real systemic change and oversight,” he said, noting that Congress must think bigger about how to prevent such wrongdoing from happening again. “The United States Constitution created Congress and gave it the duty – not the authority, the duty – the responsibility to do oversight, to go after corruption.” He also gave the best explanation I’ve heard for why standing up to this President matters beyond any individual case. “Donald Trump – his thesis is that fear is contagious,” Crow said. “And that’s actually true. But courage and hope is more contagious.” I fought back. So did Crow. So did comedians and news networks and foreign countries that refused to fold. “You push back, he backs down,” Crow said. “Bullies rarely punch up, they punch down. And they’re not used to having people punch back.” Trump knows what’s coming. He has reportedly promised to pre-emptively pardon all his top administration officials before he leaves office. That tells you that he fears the tables turning and that he’s already working on how to escape accountability. While pardons can shield his people from federal prosecution, they cannot stop Congress from investigating, and they cannot stop Congress from writing into law the guard-rails everyone assumed were already there. That’s the mission. I want the order Trump signed against me to be both the first and last of its kind in American history. Punishing him would feel good. But making sure no president can ever do it again would be worth far more.