Payback Season: Punk Unleashes White House Vendetta, And Justice Looks the Other Way

The city was a dame with a dark past, and Washington in the spring of ’25 was wearing its shadows like a cheap fur, trying to cover the stench of old grudges and fresh fear. The Boss was back in the big chair at 1600 Pennsylvania, and the word on the street, from the marble halls to the back-alley newsrooms, was that he hadn’t forgotten a single slight from his time in the wilderness. His memory was longer than a Senate filibuster, and twice as mean. They called it “policy”; I called it payback, served ice-cold from the White House kitchen, and it was hitting targets faster than a hired gun with an itchy trigger finger.

First came the whispers, then the quiet shivs in the dark for yesterday’s men – guys who’d sung the wrong tune or penned the wrong page when the Boss was out of town. John Bolton, the walrus-mustached ex-National Security Advisor who’d spilled the beans in a tell-all book, found his Secret Service shadow shrinking away, a real neat trick considering Tehran had a contract out on him. “Part of the retribution campaign,” Bolton growled to NBC, a man who knew a setup when he saw one. “Each thing he can do makes him feel a little bit better.” Then there was Fauci, the doc who became a household name during the plague years; Punk called him a “disaster,” and suddenly his government protection vanished too. Now he’s footing the bill for his own bodyguards. Even General Milley, the top soldier who dared to look less than thrilled during a D.C. church photo-op back in ’20, had his portrait yanked from the Pentagon wall like a bad memory. Poof. No explanation. Just an empty space and a message clearer than a .45 slug: cross the Boss, and you get erased.

And it wasn’t just the big fish. Dozens of ex-spooks who’d put their names to a letter about young Biden’s laptop during the ’20 rumble found their security clearances evaporating like morning mist. The White House mouthpiece, Brian Hughes, called ’em frauds who’d “damaged the credibility of the Intelligence Community.” Sure, pal. Or maybe they just picked the wrong horse, and the Boss never forgets a bad bet.

Then the Boss started putting the screws to the newsies, the ink-stained wretches and the talking heads on the flickering box. You can’t have the papers printing anything but the weather report and the racing form if it ain’t his weather or his horse, see? The pressure was on at CBS, a real classy dame of a network, now looking a bit frayed around the edges. Word was that Paramount, the sugar daddy upstairs, was desperate to get a big merger with Skydance past the Feds. And wouldn’t you know it, the Boss had a $20 billion “he-defamed-me” lawsuit hanging over their heads from some pre-election interview with Kamala Harris. So, the network started to sweat. CBS News chief Wendy McMahon suddenly found her “path forward” didn’t align with the company’s – a polite way of saying she was shown the door. Bill Owens, the veteran exec producer at “60 Minutes,” followed her out, grumbling about “loss of independence” and “having a minder” on his show. Seems the corporate suits, with Shari Redstone calling the shots, figured settling with Punk might just make their merger dreams come true, even if it meant tossing journalistic integrity out the window like last week’s fish. Scott Pelley, a straight shooter on “60 Minutes,” even called out the corporate meddling on air. Gutsy, but in this town, guts can get you a cement overcoat.

It wasn’t just CBS feeling the chill. WNET, a PBS station, got the jitters and snipped 90 seconds of Art Spiegelman badmouthing Punk from a documentary, right after PBS and NPR bosses got hauled before Congress to beg for their budget. Coincidence? In this city, coincidence is just another word for “plausible deniability.” Then, Punk signed an EO gutting their federal funding anyway. Over at ABC, owned by the Mouse, word came down to “The View” to cool it on the politics. Even Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post and Patrick Soon-Shiong’s LA Times started looking over their shoulders, tweaking their opinion pages, talking about “balance” when everyone knew it meant “don’t poke the bear.”

The Boss’s list was longer than a con’s rap sheet, and it kept growing. Politico laid it out like a blueprint for a purge: DHS yanking Harvard’s ticket to host international students because, the pretense went, they had a “hostile learning environment for Jewish students” (Rep. Auchincloss called that move “performative, irrational and cruel”). The FTC, now a cozy club of Punk appointees, suddenly got interested in Media Matters, a liberal watchdog that had dared to show Elroy Muskrat’s X platform playing footsie with Nazis in its ad placements. Funny how the FTC dropped other big cases right around then.

And the threats kept coming: the DOJ sniffing around ActBlue, law firms that dared to represent Punk’s foes getting the cold shoulder, a Democratic congresswoman charged with assault during a protest. Punk himself was on Truth Social, that digital soapbox of his, naming names like a man with a fresh deck of marked cards – Letitia James, Andrew Cuomo, Springsteen, Beyoncé, Bono, Oprah, Comey, “treasonous” Biden aides, even the whole damn city of Chicago. No one was too big, no one too small.

You’d think the guys in black robes, the Supreme Court, would be the last line of defense in this kind of free-for-all. But even there, the dice seemed loaded. Just this Monday, they handed Punk a win in Punk v. Wilcox, saying he could fire the heads of independent labor agencies whenever he damn well pleased, tearing up nearly a hundred years of precedent like an old IOU. Sure, they threw a bone to the money men and said the Federal Reserve was “unique” and couldn’t be touched – a promise about as solid as a three-dollar bill. But the message to every other independent outfit was clear: the Boss is in charge.

VP JD Fuxacouch, Punk’s new mouthpiece with a Yale law degree he seems to have forgotten, even had the gall to say Chief Justice Roberts was “profoundly wrong” for thinking the Court’s job was to check the President. No, according to Fuxacouch, the courts are there to make sure the “will of the American people” (as defined by Punk, natch) gets done, and to check their own excesses. It’s enough to make old Marbury v. Madison spin in its grave.

And if the judges still didn’t get the message, the Boss’s pals in the House slipped a little something into that “Big, Beautiful Bill” they just passed: a clause that would gut the courts’ power to hold anyone in contempt if no bond was posted – which it almost never is in cases against Uncle Sam. Translation: a judge’s order wouldn’t be worth the spit it took to say it. Add that to the (fictional) 2024 Supreme Court ruling that already gave the President broad immunity for “official acts,” and you’ve got a recipe for a king, not a president.

To make sure the “retribution” part of the tour ran smoothly, they even got a guy, Ed Martin, pulling double duty: top pardon attorney (the “shield,” they called it, to “bring healing to Americans victimized by the government”) and head of a new DOJ “weaponization” working group (the “sword,” to “hold bad actors accountable”). His target list? Pretty much everyone who ever looked sideways at the Boss: Russiagate folks, January 6th prosecutors, COVID “cover-up artists.” It was a neat trick: one office to hunt ’em down, another to pardon the Boss’s pals.

So there it was. The city was on edge. The Boss was back, settling scores with the precision of a tommy gun and the subtlety of a runaway cement mixer. He rambled, he raged, he posted in all caps with typos, but the message was clear: cross him, and you’d end up on the list. He knew where the trigger was on that big government gun he was holding, and he wasn’t afraid to pull it. This wasn’t just politics; it was a shakedown, old as sin and twice as ugly. And the whole damn town was holding its breath, waiting to see whose name would be called next. This case, I figured, was a long way from closed.