The Purge: Trump, Comey, and the Capture of Justice

When Justice Becomes Vengeance

Trump’s second term brings a chilling precedent: using the DOJ to punish enemies. The indictment of James Comey—once fired, now prosecuted—shows how loyalty and fear are replacing law and ethics in the highest institutions of power. What began as political theater is fast becoming a purge.

The purge continues. The names shift, the headlines flicker, but the throughline is unmistakable: one man has made the machinery of American justice a weapon of personal revenge. The latest target is James Comey — once the towering figure of federal law enforcement, now reduced to defendant in a courtroom drama that feels less like due process than ritual humiliation.

To set the scene, we have on one side Donald Trump, former and current president, who built his notoriety on gilded towers, bankrupt casinos, and a reality television persona. He boasts a business degree but no administrative experience beyond marketing his name. His record in government is a patchwork of impulsive decrees, lurid scandals, and an instinctive contempt for constitutional limits. A man described, not without cause, as a racist, a misogynist, and a bigot of the old-school carnival-barker variety.

On the other side stands James Brien Comey Jr., a man with a résumé that might once have seemed unimpeachable. U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. Deputy Attorney General under George W. Bush. General counsel of Lockheed Martin. A senior research scholar at Columbia Law. And, most famously, the seventh director of the FBI — a post he held until 2017, when Trump abruptly fired him. A lifelong Republican until 2016, when he severed ties with the party. His sudden unaffiliation spoke volumes, though the reasons hardly need spelling out.

That firing in 2017 was Trump’s first strike against Comey. It set off a chain of events that led to the Mueller investigation, the impeachment sagas, and years of partisan trench warfare. At the time, even a Justice Department not fully under Trump’s thumb could find nothing criminal in Comey’s handling of the Clinton email saga — some policy violations, yes, but no indictable offense. Trump’s chant of “lock her up” had failed to translate into “lock him up.”

But history shows that autocrats learn. Hitler in 1934 consolidated power over the courts and police to execute the infamous “Night of the Long Knives,” purging Ernst Röhm and others who had once been his loyalists but had grown inconvenient. Trump has neither Hitler’s total control of state machinery nor his ideological rigidity, but the instincts rhyme: eliminate rivals, punish defectors, and make examples of anyone who dares resist.

Now we arrive at September 2025. With Trump securely back in office and the Department of Justice firmly under his grip, Comey has been indicted on charges of false statements and obstruction. The irony is nauseating: a president under indictment for 37 felonies, including obstruction and violations of the Espionage Act, unleashing his newly loyal prosecutors on a man who once stood up to him.

The mechanics of this latest purge deserve close inspection. Trump’s DOJ first leaned on Erik Siebert, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, to bring charges. Siebert balked. Within days, he was out. Into his place stepped a most curious successor: Lindsey Halligan.

Halligan is 37 years old, photogenic in the way glossy magazines prefer, and by most accounts strikingly similar in appearance to the First Lady. Before her sudden ascent, she was a Florida insurance attorney with no prosecutorial experience of any kind. Three years ago she happened to meet Trump on a golf course, wearing, she told the New York Post, “a suit” — a detail too absurd to invent. Soon after, she was recruited into Trump’s personal legal team. By 2025, she had been installed as U.S. attorney, one of the most powerful law-enforcement posts in the nation.

This, Trump assures us, is “only the best.” The reality is a cautionary tale of patronage politics in its purest form: loyalty, beauty, and personal connection outweighing competence or independence. Halligan’s swift indictment of Comey is exactly what Trump expected of her. That she had never prosecuted so much as a traffic case mattered little; she had performed the one task that justified her appointment — obedience.

The Comey indictment itself is paper-thin, according to legal scholars across the spectrum. It rests on ambiguities in testimony, on the sort of interpretive disputes that would rarely survive judicial scrutiny. But here, the trial is almost beside the point. The objective is not conviction but degradation. Dragging a former FBI director through the mud is itself a victory for Trump. It sends a signal: resistance will be punished, and no résumé, however august, will shield you.

The echoes of authoritarian precedent cannot be ignored. Hitler’s Röhm purge removed rivals who had grown too independent. Stalin’s show trials made public examples of former comrades. In each case, loyalty tests replaced institutional boundaries. Trump is not Hitler or Stalin, but his ambitions rhyme with theirs: the transformation of law into a cudgel. He has already mused about imprisoning Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and any number of perceived enemies. With Stephen Miller — his own Goebbels, ever eager to translate bile into policy — whispering in his ear, those musings no longer feel like bluster.

Unlike Nazi Germany, America still has guardrails. Courts can dismiss flimsy charges; juries can acquit; the press can shine light on manipulation. But those guardrails weaken each time a prosecutor is removed for defiance, each time a loyalist is installed in their place, each time a grand jury is asked to rubber-stamp a politically convenient indictment. Democracy rarely collapses in a single night; it erodes in increments.

The Comey case, then, is not merely about one man’s fate. It is a test of whether American institutions retain enough independence to resist a president who treats opposition as criminality. If they fail, the purge will not stop here. It will metastasize, one indictment at a time, until the line between political rivalry and criminal prosecution disappears altogether.

History offers no comfort. Once leaders learn they can jail their critics, they do not stop. They expand. And when they run out of external enemies, they turn inward, consuming their own loyalists in the name of purity. Ernst Röhm learned that in 1934. James Comey may be learning it now. And if America does not awaken, others will follow.

Why It Matters

This isn’t just a vendetta—it’s the transformation of justice into an instrument of tyranny. When a president can prosecute rivals and reward loyalists, the line between democracy and dictatorship vanishes. The Comey indictment is a stress test for America’s institutions: if they fail to resist, the rule of law will collapse under the weight of political retribution.

Key Takeaways

• Trump’s DOJ targets political enemies, starting with James Comey.
• Loyalty and obedience now outweigh experience and lawfulness.
• The Comey case mirrors authoritarian “purges” seen in history.
• America’s institutions face a breaking point between resistance and submission.
• The pattern of vengeance—punishing dissent, rewarding loyalty—signals democratic decay.

Further Reading

1. Fascism: A Warning — Madeleine Albright: A chilling look at how authoritarianism takes root under the guise of patriotism. https://civilheresy.com/fascism a warning
2. Twilight of Democracy — Anne Applebaum: Explores how modern authoritarians erode institutions from within. https://civilheresy.com/twilight of democarcy
3. How Democracies Die — Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt: A study of how countries fall into dictatorship not through coups, but complacency. https://civilheresy.com/how democracies die