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The Vicious Cycle of Political Retribution

"Repulsive pedant." "Gross hypocrite." "Unprincipled oppressor."
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Journalist James Callender published these words about President John Adams in 1800, bankrolled by Thomas Jefferson himself. Adams responded with prosecution. Under the Sedition Act—passed to silence Adams' critics—ten editors went to prison. Callender got nine months. Jefferson later pardoned them all.
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The law expired the day Adams left office, having disgraced his presidency.

The Cycle Repeats

But the cycle would repeat. In 1918, Woodrow Wilson imprisoned Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs on sedition charges—for making an anti-war speech. When Warren Harding succeeded Wilson in 1921, he commuted Debs' sentence to time served.
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Between world wars, FDR turned the IRS into a political weapon. His son Elliott later admitted his father “may have been the originator of the concept of employing the IRS as a weapon of political retribution.” FDR aimed it at populist rival Huey Long, United Mine Workers chief John L. Lewis, and former Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon. In Mellon’s case, IRS agents found no irregularities, yet Roosevelt’s Justice Department pushed a 14-month criminal trial anyway—until a judge threw it out.
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Nearly four decades later, Richard Nixon kept an actual “enemies list,” complete with senators, journalists, and activists. He ordered his aides to “use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.” That meant unleashing tax audits, FBI surveillance, and federal contracts as weapons — the machinery of government bent toward personal revenge.
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Trump has now purged 37 intelligence officials for investigating Russian election influence, fired Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook for cutting interest rates, and indicted former National Security Adviser John Bolton days after his public criticism.
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"Unprecedented," the headlines screamed—their favorite Trump superlative. Nonsense.

The Cycle Intensifies

But this week's (precedented) indictment of former FBI Director James Comey did plunge Trump’s retribution war to new depths. Trump publicly demanded prosecution, then fired his own hand-picked U.S. Attorney for refusing. He installed his personal lawyer—a former insurance attorney with zero prosecutorial experience, who presented a flimsy and semantics-based two page indictment charging Comey with lying to Congress during the Russia investigation. Perjury cases are typically 30 to 50 pages.
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The indictment charges Comey with mischaracterizing the scope of the FBI's counterintelligence activities during his testimony. The perjury charges hinge on whether he lied about authorizing leaks in a Senate inquiry concerning Trump versus merely investigations into his associates. Criminal cases are rarely built on such nebulous distinctions. In a telling sign, the jury took the unusual step of rejecting one of three counts.

The Cycle's Destructive Power

From South Korea—where seven of the last eight presidents have been indicted or imprisoned—to Pakistan, where former Prime Minister Imran Khan now sits in jail while his predecessor Nawaz Sharif spent years imprisoned and exiled, to Brazil, where former president Bolsonaro faces 27 years in prison after his allies jailed his predecessor Lula, cycles of retribution epitomize democracies sliding toward collapse. The pattern is unmistakable: institutions are weaponized, leaders are prosecuted, their allies rally, and their successors suffer the same fate.
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Like Harding before him, Gerald Ford broke our cycle in 1974 by pardoning Nixon. “Someone must write the end to it,” he declared. “Our long national nightmare is over.” This week, Mitt Romney revealed he urged Biden to do the same for Trump, warning: “We just can't begin to be prosecuting political opponents.”
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No one should be above the law. But when prosecution becomes an endless cycle of political warfare, someone must—politically—write the end to it.
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Ford ended one American nightmare. Ours has just begun.
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