President Donald Trump on Friday walked into the Department of Justice and labeled his courtroom opponents “scum,” judges “corrupt” and the prosecutors who investigated him “deranged.”
With the DOJ logo directly behind him, Trump called his political opponents lawbreakers and said others should be sent to prison.
“These are people that are bad people, really bad people,” the president said in a rambling speech, during a section when he was condemning both the people who directed the withdrawal from Afghanistan and those he falsely accused of rigging the 2020 election. “The people who did this to us should go to jail.”
In remarks that were by turns dark, exultant and pugnacious, Trump vowed to remake the Justice Department and retaliate against his enemies.
It was, even by Trump’s standards, a stunning show of disregard for decades of tradition observed by his predecessors, who worried about politicizing or appearing to exert too much control over the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency. Trump, instead, called himself the “chief law enforcement officer in our country” and accused the DOJ’s prior leadership of doing “everything within their power to prevent” him from becoming the president.