On the morning of May 6, the FBI raided the office, and a clutch of businesses, belonging to an  82-year-old Virginia state lawmaker named L. Louise Lucas, the Democratic president pro tem of the Virginia Senate. FBI officials didn’t disclose any court documents or charges to back up the raids; they haven’t yet even indicated that Lucas was a principal target in this shadowy investigation.

They didn’t really have to. While some MAGA apologists have suggested vaguely that the probe into Lucas’s affairs dated back to the Biden administration, one calendar date is clearly far more relevant: The raids came just two weeks after Virginia voters approved the redistricting referendum that Lucas had spearheaded—one that would have given Democrats four additional House districts in the recursive gerrymandering war launched by the Republican Party. Like other high-profile efforts from federal law enforcement to go after critics of the Trump model of authoritarian rule, the Lucas action was a show of force, intended to intimidate and frighten MAGA detractors everywhere; any legal rationale was strictly an afterthought—or perhaps more accurately, a half-afterthought.

This mobilization of federal agents as enforcers of political orthodoxy is obviously yet one more indication of the country’s broader slide into autocracy—yet it hasn’t commanded sustained public attention, thanks to the very flimsiness of all these failed indictments and prosecutions. So  many of these meritless operations have been tossed out of court or abandoned that they merge quietly into the burgeoning file of rank Trumpian incompetence, alongside fiascos like the president’s “Liberation Day” tariffs crusade or his vibes-driven war on Iran. That’s dangerous, since these politically driven harassment campaigns are clearly  accelerating—and represent a crisis for the continued rule of law amid broader conditions of democratic decline.

This is the essential context for making sense of the reports surfacing this week that the FBI, under the direction of uber Trump loyalist Kash Patel, has launched a “payback squad” dedicated to turning the tables on anyone, like former special prosecutor Jack Smith, involved in investigating Trump during his first term or under President Biden. This chilling authoritarian persecution is likely just getting started—and won’t be much deterred by the potential Democratic takeover of Congress after this November’s midterms. (That indeed was why Patel, who’s otherwise been fighting to save his job amid reports that he’s been drinking extensively on the job, was smugly belligerent in his testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee this Tuesday.) 

Patel’s payback squad just distills the broader logic behind the GOP’s inquisitorial treatment of Democratic officials, former government employees critical of Trump, and journalists whom the right dislikes. Since Trump took office for a second term in January 2025, there have been precisely zero federal investigations and prosecutions of Republican lawmakers, GOP-aligned nonprofits or conservative media personalities. Instead, the president has gone out of his way to pardon convicted Republicans and Republican-allied malefactors, like Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao and former Tennessee House Speaker Glen Casada, who had been convicted of money laundering and fraud. (The FBI did raid the home of former Trump national security adviser John Bolton, and sought to indict erstwhile FBI director James Comey but that was only after they had become bitter critics of the president.) The only Democrats he has set free are people like Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar, who had been indicted on charges of bribery and money-laundering by the DOJ under Merrick Garland. Trump then blew up at Cuellar, a conservative Democrat, for not switching parties. “Such a lack of LOYALTY,” bellyached the president after Cuellar filed to run for his seat as a Democrat in December.

Trump loves to threaten prosecution of Democrats for perceived transgressions large and small, and hardly a week goes by without him calling for a prominent Democrat to be jailed. Just last week, he took to Truth Social to offer this appraisal of House minority leader: “This lunatic, Hakeem “Low IQ” Jeffries, should be charged with INCITING VIOLENCE!” 

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And Trump  has frequently ordered the DOJ to do more than issue threats. In February, a grand jury refused to indict Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), a 2028 presidential contender, along with five other Democratic members of Congress, following the DOJ’s attempt to prosecute them. Their “crime” had been posting a video reminding service members that they can and should refuse to carry out illegal orders from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, at the height of National Guard deployments in U.S. cities and the Pentagon’s illegal boat-bombing campaigns in the Caribbean and Atlantic. U.S. District Judge Richard Leon also reprimanded Hegseth for his separate efforts to demote Kelly, a retired U.S. Navy Captain, arguing that the administration was “trying to shrink the First Amendment liberties of retired servicemembers,” who “deserve more respect from their Government, and our Constitution demands they receive it!” It’s now quite common for flabbergasted judges to resort to exasperated bursts of exclamation points to capture the sheer gall of the Trump administration.

Others have not been so lucky. U.S. Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.), for example, still faces federal prosecution for the crime of “physically impeding agents” while touring an ICE detention facility in New Jersey. Democratic Newark Mayor Ras Baraka  was also arrested after the same visit—though his charges were eventually dismissed. Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who while a Congressman was a leading figure in Trump’s first impeachment in 2019, was the target of a mortgage fraud investigation launched in August 2025. The same tactic—involving, ahem, trumped-up charges stemming from mortgage documents for a second home—was  used against New York Attorney General Letitia James, whose office had won a multimillion-dollar civil judgment against the Trump Organization for fraud in 2024. 

Democratic candidates for office have also come in for malicious prosecution under the White House’s direction.  In October, Illinois Democratic House candidate Kat Abughazeleh was indicted along with several others for protesting ICE detention practices outside the agency’s Broadview facility. On April 29th, prosecutors dropped the felony charges, but Abughazeleh and her colleagues still face misdemeanors and now have to beg for money to pay off their legal bills. 

The payback squad also has left-leaning and Democratic-aligned nonprofits in its sites. This month, Media Matters For America settled its litigation with Trump’s Federal Trade Commission, after the FTC launched an investigation of the media watchdog group for publishing content critical of Elon Musk and his social-media platform X. In an amicus brief challenging the FTC’s action, the libertarian Cato Institute noted that the agency’s pursuit of Media Matters created “severe” obstacles to the site’s continued operation—and that it had “curtailed reporting, and other organizations have avoided collaborating with it.” 

In April 2025, the president ordered a DOJ investigation of ActBlue, the Democratic Party’s critical fundraising apparatus, on the flimsy pretext that the organization may have inadvertently allowed a small number of foreign donations. And just last month,  the Trump administration has targeted the Southern Poverty Law Center on the preposterous grounds that it was defrauding donors by funneling money to the extremist groups it monitors. These actions are very much of a piece with the targeting of journalists by regime officials, including the absurd January 2026 indictment of Don Lemon after he had covered an anti-ICE protest at a Minneapolis church, and the FCC’s gangster-like threats against network news divisions and late-night comedians. 

The ratio of all-caps demands for prosecutions and actual prosecutions seen through to completion is very high, but that’s not the point. It’s that the president constantly calls for inquiries into the country’s political opposition—particularly individuals or organizations aligned with what Trump regards as his persecution by the “deep state.” His lackeys at DOJ and the FBI then eagerly comply, launching real or performative investigations that can cost the targets hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees. Trump does not even bother to hide the political nature of these persecutions.  “In a way, I was the hunted, and now I’m more of the hunter,” he told NewsNation in January. 

Many observers saw this coming. In September 2024, The New Republic’s Greg Sargent warned of the “slow-burn authoritarianism” that would see the Trump administration launching one frivolous investigation after another against Trump’s critics and enemies. Even if they go nowhere, these proceedings would put the “target through months or years of deeply unsettling, and expensive, precarity,” Sargent wrote. That is exactly what has happened. To make matters worse, these prosecutions have taken root in a general climate of MAGA lawlessness, including the administration’s Gestapo-like  mass deportation campaign, unprecedented corruption including the president’s current efforts to extort the Internal Revenue Service for $10 billion in taxpayer dollars, unconstitutional and unprovoked wars and  deployments of the military in Democratic-leaning cities.

Selective prosecutions also make journalists, academics, critics, politicians and even ordinary citizens using social-media platforms think twice and self-censor. And it works. In the University of Maryland’s most recent Middle East Scholar Barometer survey, a staggering 73 percent of respondents told interviewers that they have engaged in self-censorship in  courses addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. 

If you have to worry about whether a vengeful president who mostly sits around stewing on social media over real and perceived slights will order “his” DOJ to ruin your life as you know it over a Bluesky post or a line in your syllabus, you don’t live in a democracy. You live in what political scientists call a “competitive authoritarian” regime—one in which democratic institutions have been systematically degraded to serve the needs of the ruling party. 

The opposition parties in competitive authoritarian regimes can still win elections, but they are much less likely to do so. Remember that this is all happening in the context of elected Republicans trying to systematically game district lines to protect the GOP House majority in a deranged orgy of mid-decade redistricting—the very crusade that L. Louise Lucas had disrupted in Virginia, netting her the latest in the long regress of frivolous legal actions authorized by the Trump White House. This procedural war has been blessed repeatedly by this country’s  unfathomably corrupt Supreme Court, which just finished its decades-long project of gutting the Voting Rights Act. That antidemocratic hit job will likely net about 10 seats to pad the present narrow Republican majority in the House of Representatives. Political scientist Javier Corrales coined the term “autocratic legalism” to describe how a compliant judiciary can retroactively legitimize  the actions of aspiring autocrats. That’s precisely the role now being played by the Supreme Court, which is not only blessing the Trump administration’s hourly offenses against the rule of law, but also grants legitimacy to the president’s nonstop and unapologetic defiance of district and appellate court rulings. 

Welcome to the MAGA reign of autocratic legalism. Not every prosecution will succeed—and indeed most won’t, if the courts are anything more than a partisan joke. But the fact that the executive of the world’s most fearsome power can personally order you to lose your job, threaten your university’s finances, or coerce you into undergoing a legal ordeal that will bankrupt you or your family is terrifying.

And striking down these sham political prosecutions is cold comfort in the broader context of a federal justice system operating on the payback-squad model.  The only thing stopping Trump’s authoritarian putsch from succeeding on all fronts are the thousands of district and appellate court justices who aren’t yet in the tank  for the MAGA autocratic project. Once the mindless sycophants and authoritarian helpmeets filing these lawsuits for Trump have graduated into roles in the federal judiciary—something that is already under way—the guardrails will have been well and truly dismantled. And that means the next Republican administration in Washington will be able to hunt all of us at will.