Donald Trump rambled, ranted and raved his way through the 2024 presidential campaign, but he was clear on one point. When he was elected, he would get revenge.
“I am your retribution,” Trump said to crowds of his supporters throughout the campaign.
This was not an abstraction. He had a few targets in mind.
“I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family,” he said in 2023.
There were also the judges, prosecutors and politicians who tried to hold Trump accountable for his crimes, both the ones for which he was indicted and the ones for which he was convicted. He refused to rule out an effort to prosecute Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney who prosecuted the Stormy Daniels hush-money case against him, and attacked Justice Juan Merchan, who presided over the trial, as “crooked.” Trump shared an image that called for the former Republican representative and Jan. 6 committee member Liz Cheney to be prosecuted in “televised military tribunals,” and he accused Gen. Mark Milley, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, of treason, calling his actions “so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!”
To get his revenge, Trump would turn the I.R.S., the F.B.I. and other powerful parts of the federal government against his political enemies. He would hound and harass them in retaliation for their opposition to his law stretching and lawbreaking.
For once in his public career, Trump wasn’t lying. As president, he has made it a priority to go after his political enemies.
One of his first acts once he was back in office was to remove security protections from former officials facing credible death threats, including his former secretary of state Mike Pompeo and his former national security adviser John Bolton, both of whom Trump views as disloyal. Not only did he take away their protection, knowing they were under threat from Iran, but he also publicly discussed that he had removed their security, as if to entice their antagonists.
Trump fired more than a dozen government inspectors general at various federal agencies — most likely in retaliation for the fact that it was an inspector general who informed Congress about Trump’s attempt to pressure Ukraine to investigate Biden. Trump has also tried to purge the Justice Department of any lawyers and officials who worked on the Jan. 6 investigation or helped to prosecute the Jan. 6 rioters (nearly all of whom, of course, he pardoned or released).
Trump has also placed a supplicant, Kash Patel, at the head of the F.B.I. A fervent Trump loyalist, Patel has promised to “go out and find the conspirators” who undermined Trump in office. Patel even published an enemies list of people he hoped to pursue and prosecute in a second Trump term, with names ranging from Democrats like Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris to former Trump allies like Bill Barr and Cassidy Hutchinson. Now that Patel is ensconced at the F.B.I., we should expect him to wield his new powers against the president’s foes, whether in government or outside it.
You can even understand Trump’s deep hostility toward Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, as part of his effort to punish anyone who undermines his attempt to gather and wield power. It is noteworthy that after his disastrous Oval Office confrontation with the Ukrainian president, Trump voiced his sympathy for the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, in a novel and revealing way. “Let me tell you: Putin went through a hell of a lot with me,” Trump said. “He went through a phony witch hunt where they used him and Russia.” He seems to identify so closely with Putin that he sees any scrutiny of the Russian dictator as an attack on him as well.
Altogether, Trump has done more to actualize his desire for retribution than he has to fulfill his campaign promise to lower the price of groceries or reduce the cost of housing. A telling sign, perhaps, of his real priorities in office.
This fact of Trump’s indifference to most Americans — if not his outright hostility toward them, considering his assault on virtually every government function that helps ordinary people — suggests another dimension to his revenge tour. It is almost as if he wants to inflict pain not just on a specific set of individuals but on the entire nation.
Here, it is worth taking a minute here to talk about the psychology of Donald Trump.
Some of our presidents have been complicated men. Consider Richard Nixon, a nearly Shakespearean figure of great talent and ambition whose paranoia, personal demons and lust for power proved to be his downfall.
Trump, by comparison, is not a complicated man.
His every executive function exists to satisfy his ego. He is a covetous person consumed by an insatiable desire for acquisition, a man who seems to take the seven deadly sins as a seven-day challenge. He sees every relationship as a game of dominance and seems to reject the very idea of a mutually beneficial transaction. He treats everyone around him, from employees and political allies to members of his own family, as tools to use and then discard. To cozy up to Trump is to sacrifice your dignity to his cravings and desires.
Understand these basic traits about Trump — and there is not much more to understand — and you can all but predict his behavior in any given situation. Yes, he is erratic, volatile, capricious and compulsive. But the common conceit that he is unpredictable is belied by the ease with which even a casual observer can plot his movements from A to B.
For example, Trump will always reject the results and present himself as a winner if he loses a contest. This was clear in 2016 — he even claimed that Clinton’s popular-vote victory was the result of fraud — and it came to fruition when he lost re-election in 2020, a psychic wound so grievous that the only way he could attend to it was to try to overturn the result.
Trump failed — and spent the next four years stewing over his defeat. He made “Stop the steal” his mantra and organized the entire Republican Party around the delusional claim that he was the legitimate victor in 2020. And while Trump went on to win the 2024 race, even capturing the national popular vote for the first time in his political career, it’s not at all clear that his rage and resentment have subsided. It would actually be shocking, given what we know about his behavior and personality, if he could regulate his emotions well enough to turn his anger into something more constructive.
If this is his psychological state, then it stands to reason that Trump would want revenge against the public that denied him a second term as much as he wants revenge against the officials who have tried to make him answer for his illegal actions.
It is hard to describe Trump’s first month and a half in office as something other than a retribution campaign against the American people.
Under the cover of an audit, he has empowered Elon Musk, his de facto co-president, to take an ax to any and every program that helps ordinary Americans. The so-called Department of Government Efficiency has stripped funds or personnel or both from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the National Park Service, the National Weather Service, FEMA, the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Social Security Administration, among others. It has degraded the federal government’s ability to deliver critical services to tens of millions of Americans and is endangering direct payments to millions more. There is no apparent rhyme or reason to these cuts, only a nihilistic drive to cause as much damage and to make it as irreparable as possible.
One immediate response to all of this is to say that Trump is operating according to some higher-level political and ideological perspective. And there is a cottage industry of observers who have given themselves the unenviable task of transmuting the president’s tics and utterances into something like a calculated strategy — an intellectually defensible set of doctrines rather than the thoughtless patter of an outer-borough confidence man.
But this has always strained credulity. To ask anyone, for instance, to treat the president’s display of childish pique opposite Zelensky in the Oval Office as some return to Teddy Rooseveltian great-power realism — as opposed to the embarrassing tantrum of a grade-school bully — is to demand that readers administer a self-lobotomy.
Likewise, it takes willful blindness to Trump’s own history of explicit racism to treat his crusade against diversity and integration as an embrace of meritocracy (please ignore the people he has chosen to lead the government) rather than a function of the same bigotries that drove him to attack Barack Obama as illegitimate and unfit to be president.
There is no evidence that Trump is a figure of deep thought or serious insight. There is no evidence that Trump is anything other than what he’s been for his entire time in the public eye: an ego-driven creature of boundless envy and vicious, overlapping resentments. Those resentments have led him on a grand tour of retribution against the public.
And his envy?
Well, if Trump wants anything, it is the untrammeled authority of the world’s autocrats. He wants to be a Putin or a Viktor Orban or a Kim Jong-un. He wants to rule with unchecked power. And if his psychology tells us anything, he will do everything he can to make that a reality, American democracy be damned.
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