Trump Is Taking the Nixon ‘Enemies List’ a Step Further

Donald Trump has enemies. Richard Nixon had a list of them. The differences in how these presidents’ respective adversaries were treated reveal that the federal government has taken a darker turn in 2025 than it did in the 1970s.

The origins of the pending criminal cases against James Comey, the former F.B.I. director, and Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, seem clear. In his now notorious Sept. 20 directive to Attorney General Pam Bondi posted on Truth Social, Mr. Trump demanded that the Justice Department bring charges against Mr. Comey and Ms. James, both of whom the president has long despised. Within a few weeks, and over the objections or concerns of career prosecutors, both were indicted in federal court in Virginia.

Mr. Nixon’s aides had similar plans for that president’s enemies. On Aug. 16, 1971, John Dean, the White House counsel, wrote a memo for his superiors outlining plans for “how we can use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.” Mr. Dean explained that the government could do so by using “grant availability, federal contracts, litigation, prosecution, etc.” There were initially 20 names on the list of enemies, a mix of politicians, business and union leaders, journalists and entertainers. (The White House also compiled broader lists of enemies.)

The existence of the Nixon enemies list has long been a familiar part of the broader Watergate story, but the aftermath of Mr. Dean’s suggestion is less well known. The Internal Revenue Service took some preliminary steps to investigate Mr. Nixon’s enemies, but Donald C. Alexander, who was Mr. Nixon’s commissioner of the I.R.S. in 1973, shut down attempts to use audits and other forms of harassment in that way. Mr. Alexander later wrote that he took the step because “political or social views, ‘extremist’ or otherwise, are irrelevant to taxation.” Mr. Nixon stewed about Mr. Alexander’s intransigence, and Mr. Alexander later wrote that the president had tried to fire him, but the I.R.S. commissioner stayed in place for the rest of the president’s time in office. In a similar vein, none of the people on the enemies list were criminally prosecuted by the Justice Department.

Mr. Nixon liked to fulminate against his enemies, especially in the private confines of the Oval Office, in conversations that were captured by the White House taping system. For example, on Sept. 15, 1972, in a conversation with Mr. Dean and H.R. Haldeman, the chief of staff, the president talked about unleashing the Justice Department and the F.B.I. in his second term. “They are asking for it and they are going to get it,” he said. “We have not used the power in this first four years, as you know. We have not used the bureau and we have not used Justice, but things are going to change now. And they are either going to do it right or go.”

Mr. Nixon was far from a model of ethical leadership. But the larger point is this: It didn’t happen. The indictments didn’t come.

Mr. Trump is following through, however. The indictments of Mr. Comey and Ms. James are concrete assertions of presidential power, and they have the most direct, perilous consequences for the targets. The courts will begin to address the merits of the cases shortly; on first impression, the views of the career prosecutors appear to have merit. The cases against both Mr. Comey and Ms. James look dubious — that is, not the kinds of cases that would have likely been brought if the pair had not been perceived enemies of the president.

Even if the cases wind up failing — if they are thrown out before trial or later rejected by a jury — they will have imposed tremendous costs on the defendants. Regardless of what happens later, Ms. James and Mr. Comey will not recover what they have already lost: in reputation, in legal fees, in distraction from other obligations and in overall stress.