BREAKING: How Trump failed in his latest bid to weaponize justice

Here’s three things we know about Donald Trump.

He thirsts for revenge; he’ll stretch the limits of presidential power to enact it; and he never gives up after a defeat.

No wonder that six Democratic lawmakers, all military and intelligence veterans, are bracing for what comes next despite a grand jury refusing to indict them for warning service personnel against obeying illegal orders.

“I don’t put anything past them. Donald Trump has a pretty limited … capacity to move on from things, and he doesn’t take bad news well, and he’s got quite, quite the ego,” one of the six, Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, said Wednesday.

Another of the six, Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin, was asked by CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Wednesday whether she thought the administration may make a new attempt to indict her. She replied: “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

Rep. Jason Crow, a former army ranger and paratrooper who deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, has launched a counterattack by warning of legal action unless the Department of Justice folds its retribution effort. “We are taking names, we are creating lists,” he told reporters Wednesday.

The lawmakers’ warning to the troops that started the showdown came in the form of a social media video that tipped Trump into a rage. He lambasted the six as “traitors” guilty of “sedition at the highest levels” who should potentially be eligible for the death penalty. His bid for revenge was backed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has launched an effort to lower Kelly’s last rank of captain and clip his retirement pay.

But it emerged on Tuesday that federal prosecutors in Washington had failed to convince a grand jury to indict the lawmakers. The attempt was the latest blatant example of Trump’s authoritarian bent and weaponizing of the DOJ.

The synergy of the department and the president’s personal and political goals was also on display on Capitol Hill Wednesday when Attorney General Pam Bondi attacked and taunted Democrats while declaring Trump “the greatest president in American history.”

Trump makes no secret of his zeal for vengeance and lets no attack go unanswered.

If you go after me, I’m coming for you,” he wrote on Truth Social in August 2023, defining a life mantra that as president he again has vast powers to enact. And the president told talk show host Dr. Phil McGraw in 2024 that “sometimes revenge can be justified.”

The failure of the DOJ to secure an indictment was unusual, since the bar for launching a prosecution is quite low. But it was also a remarkable constitutional moment. It’s rare when a president is directly thwarted by citizens in a validation of the republican system. If Trump’s strongman reflexes are to be defied over the next three years, it may take many more small acts of citizenship.

“What was extraordinary was that an ordinary group of American citizens, a grand jury, stood up for the rule of law, stood up to this outrageous abuse of power and of taxpayer dollars,” Democratic Rep. Maggie Goodlander, another of the six, told CNN’s Kasie Hunt on Wednesday.

“That is a win for the Constitution,” said Goodlander, a former intelligence officer in the US Navy Reserve.