WASHINGTON — After winning the election last year, Donald Trump sought to reassure Americans he wouldn’t seek vengeance against his political opponents despite making many threatening comments about his perceived enemies on the campaign trail.

“I’m not looking to go back into the past,” Trump told NBC’s “Meet the Press” in December. “I’m looking to make our country successful. Retribution will be through success.”

It was a hollow campaign promise he abandoned just a few days into his second presidential term. Now, a month later, Trump’s administration has dropped all pretense about focusing on the future by using the powers of the state to attack his political opponents, threatening federal investigations of Democratic officials, and attempting to silence dissent by banning media organizations that don’t conform to the president’s agenda.

While Trump and his MAGA allies maintain that he’s just returning the favor after being picked on by President Joe Biden’s administration, alarmed Democrats see echoes of totalitarianism in Trump’s administration, especially as the White House and billionaire Elon Musk run roughshod over Congress, freezing spending and making a mockery over its power of the purse.

“Anyone listening to Donald Trump during the campaign and knowing his background of distortion and untruth had to see it coming. Retribution for Donald Trump is like breathing for him,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said. “We warned about it and now it’s here, so we just need to fight it.”

‘Menace’ Threatens Democrats

Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, has acted as a legal attack dog for Trump and Musk, calling himself and those in his office Trump’s personal lawyers. Last week, he sent threatening letters to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) accusing the two of threatening other public officials, including Musk, and suggesting that his office would open investigations into the two Democrats. He’s also vowed to use his office to “protect” Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and “hold accountable those who threaten” the group.

“What’s happening at the D.C. attorney’s office is despotic. Ed Martin is an absolutely anti-democratic totalitarian menace,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) warned on Tuesday.

Martin, a Missouri Republican who has no experience as a judge or federal prosecutor, is serving in an acting capacity and will need to be confirmed by the Senate to stay on the job.

Most Republicans seemed unaware or unbothered by Martin’s approach so far, but Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he could have “a real challenge” getting confirmed.

“I want people to go into the FBI and the DOJ and not be guilty of the very thing that they’ve criticized their predecessors for,” Tillis told HuffPost. “If somebody violated a law — cut and dried — but don’t name a person then figure out what crime they did. I just think that that makes us no better than the people that we’re criticizing.”

Asked Tuesday if U.S. attorneys served as the president’s personal lawyers, as Martin contended, Tillis was blunt: “No.”

‘Dangerous’ Press Crackdown

The Federal Communications Commission is ordering investigations into media organizations while the White House is cracking down on the media’s ability to report from its grounds, barring The Associated Press from events because it refuses to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” and determining which news outlets can regularly cover Trump up close, shattering decades of precedent that one expert called a “dangerous move for democracy.”

“Having served as a Moscow correspondent in the early days of Putin’s reign, this reminds me of how the Kremlin took over its own press pool and made sure that only compliant journalists were given access,” Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, wrote on social media Tuesday. He added the White House is “making certain everyone else knows that the rest of us can be barred too if the president does not like our questions or stories.”

A federal judge on Monday refused to immediately order the White House to restore The Associated Press’ access to presidential events, but suggested the news organization’s legal case had merit in a coming hearing over its First Amendment rights, calling the Trump administration’s decision to exclude it from White House events “viewpoint discrimination.”

Most Republicans have said little about Trump’s crackdown on the press even as some conservative media outlets have expressed concerns regarding a future Democratic administration possibly coming after them.

“I think the AP has kind of been a propaganda outlet, to be honest with you, in the last few years, insisting on using the word ‘insurrection,’” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) told HuffPost on Tuesday, referring to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

‘We Are The Federal Law’

Trump’s administration is also using the powers of the federal government to attack Democratic-run states for standing in the way of its agenda, including efforts to restrict illegal immigration and ban transgender women from competing in women’s sports.

Earlier this month, the Justice Department sued the state of Illinois and the city of Chicago, accusing them of impeding his immigration policies, while Trump’s border czar Tom Homan suggested the DOJ launch an investigation into Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) after the progressive congresswoman attempted to educate people about their rights while facing Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

“The Fourth Amendment is clear and I am well within my duties to educate people of their rights,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote in a post online last week. “He can threaten me with jail & call names all he wants. He’s got nothing else.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Agriculture threatened to pull federal funding for the University of Maine over the weekend after Trump accused the state of disregarding his executive order barring transgender athletes assigned male at birth from competing on women’s teams. The USDA letter followed a heated exchange between Trump and Maine Gov. Janet Mills (D) during a meeting that included other governors at the White House last week.

“We are the federal law,” Trump told Mills after she said she would follow the law on the issue. “You better do it because you’re not going to get any federal funds.”

To which Mills responded: “We’ll see you in court.”

Many of Trump’s early executive orders have been put on hold by the courts, including his federal funding freeze and his bid to end birthright citizenship. Dozens of other cases are still pending before federal judges and some could make it all the way up to the Supreme Court.

“I think that combination of baseless animosity and illegality seems to be the pattern for Trump’s conduct,” former White House ethics lawyer Norm Eisen told HuffPost. “There’s nothing in his early wave of conduct that’s particularly reassuring, but when he crosses legal lines, courts are readying to push back on him.”

Paul Blumenthal contributed reporting.