Trump is now free to take revenge against those who wronged him during impeachment. Insiders told me it won't be pretty

'I think of myself along with other people who've spoken out consistently against him as being incredibly vulnerable'

On May 2nd, 2011, Americans watched then-President Barack Obama walk solemnly down a red-carpeted White House hallway to a lectern in the East Room of the White House, so he could “report to the American people and to the world” that America had avenged the 2,966 people who'd been murdered in the September 11th terrorist attacks.

It was that scene which Donald Trump sought to evoke 3,202 days later, when, accompanied by the sounds of “Hail to the Chief,” he strode down that same hallway to begin exacting vengeance of an entirely different sort.

In a statement released shortly after the Senate voted on Wednesday to acquit, White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham asked: “Will there be no retribution?”

Less than a day later, Trump delivered the answer to that question. For over an hour, the President of the United States held forth on national television to deliver expletive-laden denunciation of the myriad public servants whose attempts to hold the president within the boundaries of the law have made them bêtes noires for him and his supporters.

“We've been going through this now for over three years. It was evil. It was corrupt. It was dirty cops. It was leakers and liars. And this should never, ever happen to another president ever,” Trump said.

Over the course of his hour-long diatribe, he rattled off name after name of those at whom he feels aggrieved. At the top of the list was Utah Senator Mitt Romney, the only Republican to vote for his removal, who Trump accused of using his Mormon faith as a “crutch” to justify a vote cast out of bitterness over losing the 2012 election to Obama.

The others singled out for presidential scorn included former executive branch officials such as FBI Director James Comey — who Trump called a “sleazebag“ — ex-FBI Agent Peter Strzok, former Justice Department lawyer Lisa Page, and Democratic legislators like Rep. Adam Schiff and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

He also went out of his way to sarcastically mock two National Security Council staffers, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman — the combat-wounded Army officer who testified before the House Intelligence Committee last fall — and his twin brother Evgeny as “really amazing.”

Grisham said Trump would “talk about just how horribly he was treated… and that maybe people should pay for that” during a Thursday morning appearance on Fox News to preview the President’s remarks, and Trump appeared to confirm her prediction while attacking Comey, Stzrok, Page, and the “top scum” who run the FBI.

“Let's see what happens — it's in the hands of some very talented people,” he said, making an oblique reference to a Justice Department investigation into the origins of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. “We're going to have to see what happens.”

It appears that Trumpworld has already begun to collect, starting with those closest to home. According to one source familiar with the matter, the first to face retribution will be Col Vindman, the Harvard-educated Ukraine expert and Purple Heart recipient, who will soon be transferred to the Pentagon from his current post at the NSC, despite him being “detailed” there through late spring or early summer.

Asked about reports of Vindman's pending defenestration, Trump replied: “Well, I’m not happy with him.”

“Do you think I'm supposed to be happy with him? I'm not,” he said, adding that “they” — presumably referring to Defense Department officials — would make a decision about Vindman's fate.

Trump's allies on Capitol Hill are also taking their cues to start drawing blood on his behalf. Though the Treasury Department refused to obey a law requiring IRS officials to turn over Trump's tax records to the Democratic-controlled House Ways and Means Committee, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin had no such qualms about heeding a request for records belonging to Hunter Biden, when made by Senate Finance Committee Chair Chuck Grassley and Homeland Security Committee Chair Ron Johnson.

Grassley and Johnson have also asked the Secret Service to turn over travel records generated when Hunter Biden was an agency protectee, citing their committee review of “potential conflicts of interest posed by the business activities of Hunter Biden and his associates during the Obama administration.”

Tony Schwartz, who co-authored The Art of the Deal with Trump, said his acquittal has greatly increased the chance that the president will use the power of the federal government to retaliate against those who have spoken out against him.

“At the moment of his acquittal… the possibility or even probability that he would be positioned to do terrible things to exact revenge and to punish his enemies escalated,” Schwartz said. “I think of myself along with other people who've spoken out consistently against him as being incredibly vulnerable.”

Schwartz said he worries that a newly emboldened Trump could take a page from Richard Nixon's playbook and use agencies like the IRS to target people like him, or worse.

“What I'd really worry about is that he rounds up his enemies. He finds a pretext to use law enforcement to arrest them. It's what autocrats do,” he said. “They go after their enemies by using their power over law enforcement to arrest them even if on false grounds and imprison them. And I think Trump is every bit as capable of doing that if he believes he can get away with it as Putin, or Kim Jong-un, or any dictator or autocrat is.”

While Schwartz predicted that the looming 2020 election might constrain Trump's impulses, he admitted that many of his “worst fears” of what his former collaborator would be like as president have come true, and many more could be realized if Trump is re-elected.

Trump, he said, could go so far as to use emergency powers to attempt to shut down media outlets or declare some form of martial law with little constraints on his power “because nobody will stand in his way.”

“The Justice Department won't stand in his way. The Republican Senate won't stand in his way. The increasingly Trump-influenced court system won't stand in his way. I believe people vastly underestimate the level of danger that we're facing,” he said.

Another onetime Trump confidante, former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, also predicted Trump would seek to exact a price from his adversaries in the wake of his impeachment trial.

When asked how far the president would go to get back at Democrats, Bannon replied: “Winning. Big League.”

One of the House Democrats who played a role in the inquiry which led to Trump's impeachment, Rep. Jamie Raskin, also worried that Trump might misuse his power for personal advantage or revenge.

“Obviously we've seen this president engage in retaliatory and vindictive behavior towards his perceived or real political enemies,” said Raskin, a Maryland congressman who taught constitutional law at American University's Washington College of Law for two decades before his election to the House. “But no president has the right to use governmental resources or offices to exact revenge on US citizens.”

Raskin said he and his colleagues are now considering every tool at their disposal to maintain Congress' status as a legitimate check on the president's power.

“The lawmaking branch of government is the superior and predominant branch of government, and the President's sole job is to take care that the laws are faithfully executed,” Raskin said. “He may be a king in his own mind, but he's not a king in our system of government. He is an impeached president, and he does not run the House of Representatives.”

And while Trump, by all indications, is feeling newly unbound in the wake of his acquittal by the Senate, Raskin said many of his colleagues now feel similarly about the legislative branch's own inherent powers, including that of “inherent contempt,” a rarely used power of the House which allows the body to vote to order the House Sergeant-at-Arms to detain witnesses who ignore Congressional subpoenas.

“There has been tremendous interest in using the inherent powers of contempt from the beginning, but most, most of the House did not want to distract from the dynamics of the impeachment process,” he explained. “With that being gone, there is revived interest in using the inherent powers of contempt that we have.“

Moreover, Raskin said the House could also vote to cut off funds for the executive branch, including possibly zeroing out salaries of administration officials who defy Congress.

“We have the power of the purse despite the fact that the President continues to reprogram money that has been appropriated for particular purposes, and we undoubtedly will get serious about our use of the appropriations power to get this President to follow the law,” he said. “We have a sworn responsibility to uphold and defend the constitution, so we have no choice.”