Democrats won the midterms talking about grocery bills.
Their first move after the votes came in was a shakedown campaign aimed at Americans who wrote checks to the wrong side.
But President Trump just fired back with a demand aimed squarely at his own party’s Senate.
Letters With a Deadline Attached
President Trump went on Truth Social and called what Democrats are doing to Republican donors “absolutely unprecedented, and totally illegal.”
He didn’t leave it there. “Please report them to the Department of Justice, IMMEDIATELY!” Trump wrote. “If you would like, send them directly to me, your President.”
And he saved the harshest line for the people behind it. “These SLEAZEBAGS should go to jail for what they are doing,” Trump wrote.
The post followed an earlier one in which Trump accused Democrats of “threatening our Donors, some of the most respected people anywhere in the World, with imprisonment, and many other levels of punishment, just because they happen to be Republicans, or Republican supporters.”
So what set him off?
Start with US Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT). Blumenthal expects to chair a key Senate investigative subcommittee once Democrats take over in January, and he isn’t waiting around for the gavel. According to CNN, he fired off letters to a long list of companies and administration officials, including Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, and several donors to the White House ballroom project, among them Amazon, Apple, and Google.
Crypto firms World Liberty Financial, Binance, and Tether landed on the list too.
Blumenthal set a deadline in early January, one day after the new Congress gets sworn in. And he warned that his panel would look at “alternative measures to obtain compliance” if the recipients didn’t cough up what he wants.
Here’s the part that matters. CNN noted that nobody who got one of these letters has any obligation to answer until the new Congress actually takes power. Blumenthal holds no subpoena power over anyone right now. He mailed them anyway.
Nobody needs a law degree to read that letter. Give money to a White House project, and a Senate Democrat shows up in your mailbox with a deadline and a vague warning about what happens if you don’t play along.
The Rest of the Pack Lined Up Behind Him
Blumenthal has plenty of company.
US Representative Jared Huffman (D-CA), the top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, has vowed to investigate whether ballroom donors got favorable treatment from the administration, France 24 reported.
US Representative Robert Garcia (D-CA), in line to chair the House Oversight Committee, greeted election night with a two-word, all-caps message on social media: “LAWYER UP.”
And US Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) has promised Democrats will go after corporations and law firms that, in his telling, “collaborated” or “capitulated,” according to RedState.
Then there’s US Senator Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), whom Trump called out by name in his earlier post. Democrats insist Trump twisted her words. So go straight to what she said.
At a University of Chicago appearance before the election, Slotkin laid out her plans. “I want to look at these signature cases and not just focus on the president, but on the people who enabled him,” Slotkin said, according to The Federalist.
She went on to describe young people coming out of school and asking themselves, “Should I go work for the Trump administration?” The Federalist reported she framed the whole thing as a “deterrence message.”
Read that twice. A sitting US Senator described legal cases against administration staffers as a way to scare the next generation out of Republican politics. Most of the press still files Slotkin under “moderate.”
Alabama Tried This Move in 1958
None of this is new. The people in power have always known that a list of names is a weapon.
In 1958, Alabama demanded that the NAACP hand over its membership list. The Supreme Court shut the state down in NAACP v. Alabama, recognizing that exposing a group’s supporters to people with power could choke off the freedom to associate. The Cato Institute has pointed out that Alabama wanted that list for one reason: to intimidate the people on it.
Fast-forward to 2021. California’s Attorney General’s office required charities to turn over the names of their major donors. In Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for a 6-3 majority that struck the policy down, finding it chilled the right of Americans to support causes privately.
But conservatives didn’t need a Supreme Court opinion to learn the lesson. In 2013, the IRS admitted it singled out groups with “Tea Party” or “patriot” in their names for extra scrutiny. Operatives at conservative groups later told Fox News that fear of IRS reprisals remained a top worry among nervous donors.
That’s how this game works. The envelope does the work. A company with billions in government contracts doesn’t need to be convicted of anything to get the message. It just needs to see what happened to the last company that crossed the wrong committee chairman.
And the ballroom donors are big names with bigger legal departments. The retiree in Alabama or Ohio who sends $25 to a Republican candidate has neither. If Democrats can rattle Apple and Google with a letter before they even hold the gavel, folks have every reason to wonder who ends up on the next list.
Why Trump Pointed at the Senate
Notice who Trump actually aimed at. “The Senate must act, and stop being pushed around to the point of the Republican Party losing Elections, and worse!” he wrote. He named the Justice Department and the House of Representatives too.
Republicans hold the Senate gavels until January. Trump clearly thinks too many GOP senators shrug off these Democrat threats as campaign noise.
Representative Steve Scalise (R-LA) isn’t shrugging. He sent every Republican committee chairman a letter warning that Democrats “will weaponize every single gavel to appease their radical base,” according to RedState. Scalise asked the chairs to inventory the probes Democrats already started and name who is most likely to get targeted next.
But Trump’s line about “losing Elections” opens a door worth walking through. Republicans did lose, and badly. Donors didn’t cause that, and neither did ICE. The NBC News exit poll found 63 percent of voters said military action against Iran was the wrong decision, and 83 percent of those voters backed Democrats.
The neocon hawks who pushed the President into that war own that bill. Voters sent a message about a fight in the Middle East. Democrats heard something else entirely: a green light to rifle through the files of anybody who wrote a check to the other side.
Blumenthal’s January deadline sits on the calendar. His office still hasn’t said what happens to the companies that miss it.
Sources:
President Donald J Trump, Truth Social post (as provided)
Trump’s Truth, “Donald J Trump: The Democrats are going around threatening a lot of people…” (trumpstruth.org)
CNN, “Live updates: Democrats weigh leadership plans after midterms upend balance of power in Washington”
Fox News, “Trump orders DOJ probe into Democrats over alleged threats against admin officials”
France 24, “Democrats warn Trump camp to ‘lawyer up’ as anger over corruption drives midterms wipeout”
RedState, “Every GOP Chairman Just Got This Urgent Letter Warning of the Coming Democrat Retribution”
The Federalist, “The Democrat Party Platform Is Throwing Conservatives In Prison And Slotkin Just Said It Out Loud”
Cato Institute, “Supreme Court Protects Donor Privacy in Important Decision”
Ballotpedia, “Americans for Prosperity v. Bonta”