Like Nixon, Trump plans to use the IRS to take down his political enemies
In the early 1970s, then-President Richard Nixon developed a political enemies list to be used to take down his political opponents. One of the methods incorporated by Nixon to accomplish this task involved using the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to obtain financial and other personal information on those opposed to his presidency. In 2025, current-President Donald Trump plans to follow in his predecessor’s footsteps by using the IRS to take down his political enemies.
Nixon’s list, which was part of a campaign officially known as the “Opponents List and Political Enemies Project” and became public knowledge during hearings with the Senate Watergate Committee in 1973, had a very specific purpose according to Dean’s memorandum:
“This memorandum addresses the matter of how we can maximize the fact of our incumbency in dealing with persons known to be active in the opposition to our administration. Stated a bit more bluntly — how we can use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.”
According to Joseph Thorndike, director of the Tax History Project at Tax Analysts, Nixon’s intentions concerning the use of the IRS to take down his political opponents were caught on tape (via NPR.org):
Oval Office recordings from 1971 reveal how Nixon sought to install a hand-picked enforcer at the IRS to do his political bidding.
“I want to be sure he’s a ruthless son of a bitch,” Nixon told aides about a potential IRS nominee. “That he will do what he’s told. That every income tax return I want to see, I see. That he’ll go after our enemies and not go after our friends. It’s as simple as that.”
Nixon’s plans to snoop on tax returns, or have the IRS investigate targets from his “enemies list,” were not always successful, Thorndike says. But not for lack of trying.
“Nixon tried very hard to misuse the IRS,” Thorndike says. “Congress certainly saw that as a danger afterwards. If the president is developing enemies lists and sending them to the IRS and essentially saying, ‘I want you to audit all these people I don’t like,’ that’s worrisome. And so, Congress was very interested in preventing that.”
Nixon’s enemies list included members of the U.S. Senate, the House of Representatives, along with state-level and other politicians. It also included various political organizations, labor union and business leaders, celebrities, the news media, and major universities. And if that list sounds familiar, it’s because Donald Trump’s enemies list is a near carbon copy — only the names have changed (via NPR.org):
From utilizing tax data to trace immigrants without legal status to threatening Harvard University’s tax exemption, President Trump has been trying to use the IRS for his own political purposes, in ways that may seem unprecedented.
But they’re not. Former President Richard Nixon laid the groundwork more than four decades ago, when he tried to use the tax collector to punish his enemies and assist his friends.
“One of the things that Nixon did consider was threatening the tax-exemptions of universities,” says Thorndike. “And that sounds very familiar if you’re reading the paper these days.”
Nixon was angry at universities for not cracking down on Vietnam War protesters. Trump has similarly complained about Harvard and other Ivy League schools not doing more to silence protests against the war in Gaza, amid an administration crackdown on antisemitism on college campuses.
“We are going to be taking away Harvard’s Tax Exempt Status,” Trump wrote in a social media post. “It’s what they deserve!”
Trump is drawing on Nixon’s old playbook, despite laws put in place after Watergate to prevent that kind of meddling by the White House. (Emphasis mine)
While Nixon only “sought to install” an enforcer to infiltrate the IRS and obtain personal information on taxpayers, Trump actually did install one — with the approval of the Republican-controlled Congress — in the person of Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency, aka DOGE. In a Wired.com piece from last month, the intentions of Trump and Musk (along with software billionaire Peter Thiel and a host of loyal soldiers) were fully exposed:
Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has plans to stage a “hackathon” next week in Washington, DC. The goal is to create a single “mega API”—a bridge that lets software systems talk to one another—for accessing IRS data, sources tell WIRED. The agency is expected to partner with a third-party vendor to manage certain aspects of the data project. Palantir, a software company cofounded by billionaire and Musk associate Peter Thiel, has been brought up consistently by DOGE representatives as a possible candidate, sources tell WIRED.
Two top DOGE operatives at the IRS, Sam Corcos and Gavin Kliger, are helping to orchestrate the hackathon, sources tell WIRED. Corcos is a health-tech CEO with ties to Musk’s SpaceX. Kliger attended UC Berkeley until 2020 and worked at the AI company Databricks before joining DOGE as a special adviser to the director at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). Corcos is also a special adviser to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
Corcos has discussed plans for DOGE to build “one new API to rule them all,” making IRS data more easily accessible for cloud platforms, sources say. APIs, or application programming interfaces, enable different applications to exchange data, and could be used to move IRS data into the cloud. The cloud platform could become the “read center of all IRS systems,” a source with direct knowledge tells WIRED, meaning anyone with access could view and possibly manipulate all IRS data in one place. (Emphasis mine)
Nixon was notorious for his vindictive approach to dealing with his political enemies, and Trump made his abhorrence concerning those who refuse to bow to his magnanimousness clear for all to see during his 2024 campaign when he promised to use a second term to exact his revenge against a long list of enemies.
Like Nixon, Donald Trump plans to use the IRS to take down his political enemies, once again proving what we’ve know about him from the beginning: he is a threat to liberty and the Constitution. And despite this fact, still calls himself the “law and order” president. Kind of like Nixon when he said, “I’m not a crook.”
I’m not sure, but if he was still alive, I think Nixon would be giving Trump his full support.
David Leach is the owner of the Strident Conservative and the author of The New Axis of Evil: Exposing the Bipartisan War on Liberty. He holds people of every political stripe accountable for their failure to uphold conservative values, and he promotes those values instead of political parties.
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