I don’t care for the tone of Kyle Cheney’s latest piece for Politico, entitled “MAGA world swallows a difficult truth: Arresting Trump’s opponents is easier said than done.”

I get the basic point. Donald Trump has raised expectations that not only an alleged pedophile ring of Democrats linked to Jeffrey Epstein will be exposed and arrested, but that many of his high profile critics and political opponents will be arrested as well. And yet, to date, the MAGA world hasn’t seen any results and they’re deeply disappointed.

Cheney basically mocks these folks for being gullible and having unrealistic expectations. Following through on arresting people is hard work, especially when the allegations against them are total bullshit.

On one basic fact, I agree with Cheney. There is real dissatisfaction and disillusionment within MAGA ranks. But he’s got the story all wrong.

The issue isn’t the Trump hasn’t done enough to appease these folks, but rather that he’s completely out of control in his effort to satisfy them.

Let’s take a look:

It’s a familiar refrain for Trump’s second term: The far right lusts to see prominent Democrats or Trump adversaries hauled off in handcuffs, only to be let down when their revenge fantasies run into reality.

“They voted for that and now they realize they can’t have retribution because it’s not legally sound,” said Gene Rossi, a white collar criminal defense lawyer who spent 30 years at the Justice Department.

This cycle — impetuous promises of criminal consequences followed by dejection when Trump’s enemies aren’t immediately arrested — has already happened with Jack Smith, with James Comey, even with Joe Biden and Barack Obama (and their top advisers). The Trump administration has ordered investigations of all these figures, but legal experts say the probes are largely performative and unlikely to prompt serious or legitimate criminal charges.

With respect to Jack Smith, the man who obtained dozens of federal grand jury indictments against Trump, he is now subject to an inquiry into whether he violated the Hatch Act by engaging in political interference. He ably and preemptively defended himself against this charge when he dropped the charges in the aftermath of Trump winning the 2024 election. It’s true that the Smith inquiry is being carried out by the independent Office of Legal Counsel rather than the Department of Justice, and may be just a fig leaf to satisfy the MAGA crowd, but that doesn’t mean Smith isn’t being harassed or won’t have to incur costs to defend himself. The investigation is an abuse of power.

With respect to James Comey, he has suffered severe harassment. The New York Times reported that he, along with former FBI director Andrew McCabe, were subjected to politically motivated IRS audits during Trump’s first term in office. In July, Trump fired Comey’s daughter without cause from her position as a federal prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. And not the FBI and the CIA are coming after him, as well as former CIA director John Brennan.

The FBI is investigating former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey for possible false statements to Congress following a referral from the current CIA Director John Ratcliffe, according to a person briefed on the matter.

The referral came after Ratcliffe last week released a review that criticized the 2016 US intelligence community assessment, long criticized by President Donald Trump and his allies, that found Russian President Vladimir Putin sought to intervene in the election on Trump’s behalf. In a post on X, Ratcliffe said the new review found that the original assessment “was conducted through an atypical & corrupt process under the politically charged environments of former Dir. Brennan & former FBI Dir. Comey.”

Relatedly, the Trump administration has falsely accused Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton of a treasonous conspiracy to steal the 2016 election and attempt to remove him from office after won. His director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, announced she is making criminal referrals to the Department of Justice and the FBI. Even if it turns out that these “probes are largely performative and unlikely to prompt serious or legitimate criminal charges,” this is a gross abuse of power.

With respect to Joe Biden, specifically, Trump has arranged for the Republican-led House of Representatives to subpoena his advisors in an attempt to prove that he was far more mentally incapacitated than generally believed during his presidency, and that therefore some of his pardons are invalid because he was supposedly incapable of making those decisions.

I think it’s a mistake to be sanguine about how these abuses will turn out in the end. But the immediate problem is that the abuses are occurring at all. They are equally outrageous and dangerous, and the story here isn’t that MAGA folks are disappointed in the results so far. The story is that the president of the United States is completely out of control.