Davis told a Politico reporter he was trolling. Then MAGA thugs cornered the reporter.
In a profile of Davis published Friday, Politico reporter Adam Wren discussed being accosted by Trumpist goons while he was reporting from the Republican National Convention.
Wren’s piece chronicles how Davis’ star has risen within the MAGA movement due to his willingness to defend Trump in the wake of his indictments on state and federal changes. Wren particularly highlights Davis’ incendiary calls for retaliatory prosecutions if Trump is elected in November, such as his August 2023 statement that he would use a “three-week reign of terror” as attorney general to carry out his “five lists” of people to fire, indict, deport, imprison, and pardon.
But in interviews for the piece, Davis maintained to Wren that his statements about sending people like me to a “gulag” shouldn’t be taken literally. From the profile (emphasis in the original):
Davis will admit to being quite serious about much of what he says in the media, including wanting to dismantle the power of the federal government, an idea he has held onto since his Gingrich days. But he told me he is obviously joking about some of the more inflammatory promises — putting kids in cages and detaining journalists in a gulag. He later told me the sound bite was “a self-inflicted wound,” but also said he “didn’t want to back down from it.”
“It’s hilarious that it’s so easy to trigger these people. I’m obviously trolling them,” Davis told me of Democrats.
Davis’ allies are apparently not quite so sure.
Wren writes that when he accompanied Davis to a ninth-floor hotel bar frequented by the Trump family and their hangers-on during the Republican National Convention, he observed Davis being “greeted by Republican revelers like a caesar” — and overheard Donald Trump Jr. telling the GOP operative, “I want you to be my father’s attorney general for all four years.”
Then a woman “demanded” that Wren either delete his notes of that interaction or hand over his phone, “recruited four men to block the elevators” when he refused, and issued a not-terribly-veiled threat. Unable to access the elevators to leave the bar, Wren wrote that he fled down the stairs, pursued by two of the goons.
Wren further described the incident in an interview with The Bulwark:
Davis, Wren explained in his piece, subsequently “confronted the aide near the elevators and dressed her down” and told the reporter what happened was “fucking shocking.”
The Politico profile concludes with an adviser to Donald Trump Jr. telling Wren that the behavior he had experienced was unacceptable — and also that Don Jr.’s comments to Davis about serving as attorney general were merely “trolling.”
Donald Trump spent his White House years demanding — and receiving — probes of his enemies
In a lengthy investigation published over the weekend, New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt reviewed the cases of 10 individuals who “faced federal pressure of one kind or another” following Trump’s “public or private demands for them to be targeted by the government” during his presidency.
Schmidt revealed:
- In the spring of 2018, Trump told White House counsel Donald McGahn “that he wanted to order” Attorney General Jeff Sessions “to prosecute” Hillary Clinton and former FBI Director James Comey, “and that if Mr. Sessions refused he would take matters into his own hands.”
- Lawyers in the White House counsel’s office subsequently authored a memo to the then-president which “made clear that Mr. Trump did not have the authority ‘to initiate an investigation or prosecution yourself or circumvent the attorney general by directing a different official to pursue a prosecution or investigation,’ as one draft memo put it.”
- Nonetheless, “within a month, Mr. Trump plunged ahead with one of his most successful efforts to have a Democratic critic investigated. He publicly demanded and ultimately got an inquiry by federal prosecutors into” former secretary of state John Kerry.
- “Through the rest of Mr. Trump’s time in office, he never let up on pressuring federal agencies to take action against his perceived enemies even as he was counseled against it by aides like Mr. McGahn and John F. Kelly, the White House chief of staff from the middle of 2017 until the beginning of 2019.”
- “In a few of the cases where Mr. Trump wanted investigations, there was legitimate basis for action. But in many others, there was little or no legal justification. None resulted in a criminal conviction.”
- “There is no record of the inquiries and other actions coming about as a result of a formal, signed order from Mr. Trump. Instead, he repeatedly signaled what he wanted, publicly and privately, leaving no doubt among subordinates.”
- “At least two other West Wing officials defied Mr. Trump’s repeated instructions not to take notes and wrote down accounts of Mr. Trump’s eruptions about using the federal government to target his perceived enemies. Those notes were taken from the White House as well to ensure there was documentation.”
Schmidt’s list of investigations Trump demanded into his foes is lengthy but by no means exhaustive. It mentions, for example, that “federal prosecutors and a special counsel examined nearly all the issues and conspiracy theories Mr. Trump raised about Mrs. Clinton, her campaign and the Clinton Foundation,” but it omits the ultimately fruitless two-year review of her role as secretary of state in the sale of the company known as Uranium One that he had sought.
Nor does it reference every instance in which Trump sought government retaliation against his critics. Schmidt’s list notes that “the Justice Department obtained phone and email records for reporters for CNN, The Washington Post and The New York Times” as part of leak investigations, but it does not detail Trump’s efforts to use federal regulatory powers to punish news outlets.
Nevertheless, it shows quite clearly that Trump’s impulse to prosecute his political foes found few restraints during his presidency — and could be even more dangerous in a second term.
The staffing plans developed under the auspices of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 are intended to empower loyalists while keeping out people like McGahn, who reportedly tried to prevent Trump from exercising his whims. Meanwhile, presidential efforts to pressure Justice Department officials to take action were specifically rendered immune from federal prosecution thanks to the radical doctrine the Supreme Court enshrined over the summer in Trump v. United States.
Trump, for his part, continues to regularly accuse his political opponents of crimes. That has critics worried he would once again urge the Justice Department to initiate investigations if he returned to office. But Trump’s supporters say such claims are overwrought. “His defenders often seek to explain away Mr. Trump’s threats to take legal action against opponents as campaign trail bluster,” Schmidt wrote.
In other words, they’re claiming that Trump is just trolling.
