Executive actions intended to cripple top Democratic law firms. Investigations of Democratic fund-raising and organizing platforms. Ominous suggestions that nonprofits aligned with Democrats or critical of President Trump should have their tax exemptions revoked.
Mr. Trump and his allies are aggressively attacking the players and machinery that power the left, taking a series of highly partisan official actions that, if successful, will threaten to hobble Democrats’ ability to compete in elections for years to come.
So far, the attacks have been diffuse and sometimes indiscriminate or inaccurate. But inside the administration, there are moves to coordinate and expand the assault.
A small group of White House officials has been working to identify targets and vulnerabilities inside the Democratic ecosystem, taking stock of previous efforts to investigate them, according to two people familiar with the group’s work who requested anonymity to describe it.
Scott Walter, president of the conservative watchdog group Capital Research Center, which monitors liberal money in politics, recently briefed senior White House officials on a range of donors, nonprofit groups and fund-raising techniques. The White House group is said to be exploring what more can be done within the law.
It is not unusual for partisans in Congress or their outside allies to push for investigations into political groups on the other side of the aisle.
But using the levers of government to target the opposition has long been considered an abuse of power, sometimes leading to prosecution. Mr. Trump himself was impeached in 2019 for pressuring the Ukrainian government to investigate the Bidens.
Mr. Trump’s continued willingness to defy that norm — including in a grievance-filled speech at the Justice Department on Friday, during which he name-checked a litany of critics and called them “horrible people,” “thugs” or “scum” — has Democrats sounding the alarm….
The billionaire Elon Musk, the top Trump donor leading the administration’s cost-cutting initiative, has appeared to encourage investigations of institutions that form the financial backbone of the left. They include ActBlue, the donation platform that helps fund virtually the entire Democratic Party and that congressional Republicans are already probing, and Arabella Advisors, a consulting firm that manages difficult-to-trace “dark money” groups that collectively have spent billions of dollars helping Democrats and their causes.
“Something stinks about ActBlue,” Mr. Musk wrote March 7 in one of several social media posts about the platform. A day later, he claimed without evidence that ActBlue was funded by Democratic megadonors including Herb Sandler, who died in 2019.
(Megan Hughes, an ActBlue spokeswoman, denied that the group was funded by the people Mr. Musk named, living or dead. “The only funders that ActBlue has are small-dollar donors that work sacrificially to fund worthy campaigns and causes,” she said in a statement.)
At the recent White House briefing, according to a person familiar with it, Mr. Walter presented research about ActBlue and major Democratic donors, leaving behind materials including copies of a book he published last year about Arabella.
Congressional officials say the Trump administration has signaled that it intends to throw its weight behind investigations of ActBlue in the House. And Senator Ted Cruz of Texas has suggested that ActBlue might have criminal exposure. He has also demanded documents from and threatened to subpoena another key company providing digital infrastructure for the left, Bonterra, which runs a crucial Democratic voter database system and supplies much of the party’s organizing software….
“CREW is a charitable organization, and that’s a political thing,” Mr. Trump said on Friday at the Justice Department, singling out Norm Eisen, a former board member, as a “vicious and violent” person who has “been after me for nine years.” (Mr. Eisen’s new group, State Democracy Defenders Fund, has also fought some of the new administration’s actions in court.)
Jordan Libowitz, a CREW spokesman, declined to comment on Mr. Trump’s mention of the group.
Personal grievance also figured heavily into directives Mr. Trump recently issued restricting access to government information and contracts for lawyers at firms associated with his critics.
The targeted firms include Perkins Coie, which was paid about $5 million by the Democratic National Committee and other party committees during the 2024 elections. It had earned Mr. Trump’s ire by facilitating funding for since-discredited research on behalf of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and the D.N.C. into his team’s dealings with Russia.
Covington & Burling, which received nearly $8.6 million from the D.N.C. and former Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign in the 2024 campaign cycle, was targeted by a presidential memorandum stripping security clearances from lawyers who represented Jack Smith, the former special counsel who pursued two separate indictments of the president in 2023.
The D.N.C. declined to comment on Mr. Trump’s moves against the law firms and its vendors, including ActBlue.
A third law firm, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, was the subject of an executive order Friday restricting its business activities because one of its lawyers, Mark F. Pomerantz, had tried to build a criminal case against Mr. Trump several years ago when Mr. Pomerantz worked at the Manhattan district attorney’s office.
Perkins Coie has lost “significant revenue” as a result of the order, lawyers for the firm said in a lawsuit that prompted a judge to halt parts of the order.
On Friday, Mr. Trump singled out Mr. Pomerantz and Marc Elias, a former Perkins Coie lawyer who had been the firm’s point person on the Russia research. Calling them “radicals” and “really bad people,” Mr. Trump confusingly claimed that the lawyers had “tried to turn America into a corrupt Communist and third world country.”
On MSNBC afterward, Mr. Elias said, “I’d be an idiot not to be worried.”
But he vowed to continue battling Mr. Trump. “The question is not whether we are worried,” he said, adding, “The question is what do we do.”…