By Peter Wehner
Thursday, March 20, 2025
No one can say they didn’t know.
During his first official campaign rally for the 2024
Republican nomination, held in Waco, Texas, Donald Trump vowed retribution
against those he perceives as his enemies.
“I am your warrior,” he said
to his supporters. “I am your justice. For those who have been wronged and
betrayed, I am your retribution.”
Sixty days into Trump’s second term, we have begun to see
what that looks like.
The president fired the archivist of the United States
because he was enraged at the National Archives for notifying
the Justice Department of his alleged mishandling of classified documents
after he left office following his first term. (The archivist he fired hadn’t
even been working for the agency at the time, but that didn’t matter.) He also fired
two Democratic members of the Federal Trade Commission, a traditionally
independent regulatory agency, in violation of Supreme Court precedent and
quite likely the language of the statute that created it. (Both members plan to
sue to reverse the firings.)
Trump stripped
security details from people he had appointed to high office in his first
administration and subsequently fell out with, including General Mark Milley,
former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former National Security Adviser John
Bolton, the former diplomat Brian Hook, and the infectious-disease expert
Anthony Fauci. The National Institutes of Health, where Fauci worked for 45
years, is being gutted
by the Trump administration. The environment there has become
“suffocatingly toxic,” as my
colleague Katherine J. Wu reported.
Trump has sued
networks and newspapers for millions of dollars. His Federal Communications
Commission is investigating
several outlets. And he has called
CNN and MSNBC “corrupt” and “illegal”—not because they have broken any
laws, but simply because they have been critical of him.
Trump’s FBI director, Kash
Patel, told the MAGA podcaster Steve Bannon in a 2023
interview that “we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied
about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections—we’re
going to come after you.”
Trump has also come after the legal profession, expanding
his attacks on private law firms and threatening the ability of lawyers to
do their job and private citizens to obtain legal counsel. U.S. Marshals have
warned federal judges of unusually high threat levels as Elon Musk and other
Trump-administration allies “ramp up efforts to discredit judges,” according to
a Reuters report.
On his social-media site, Musk has attacked judges in more than 30 posts since
the end of January, calling them “corrupt,” “radical,” and “evil,” and deriding
the “TYRANNY of the JUDICIARY.”
Earlier this week, Trump targeted a federal judge, James
E. Boasberg, who ordered a pause in deportations being carried out under an
obscure wartime law, the Alien
Enemies Act of 1798. Trump, who ignored that court order, called
the judge a “Radical Left Lunatic” and demanded his impeachment. (Chief Justice
John Roberts responded to the president’s attack with a rare public
rebuke.) Trump and his supporters are clearly looking for a showdown with
the judicial branch, which could precipitate a constitutional crisis.
But that’s hardly where the efforts at intimidation end.
Trump’s antipathy
for Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, was on vivid display a few
weeks ago, when the president berated Zelensky in a televised Oval Office
meeting. Trump’s hostility toward the Ukrainian president, whom he referred to
as a “dictator,” is
explained in part by his
long-standing affinity for totalitarian leaders such as Vladimir Putin, who
invaded Ukraine three years ago. But it almost surely also has to do with
Trump’s embrace of a
conspiracy theory that Ukraine
intervened in the 2016 presidential election in an effort to defeat him.
(In fact it was Russia,
not Ukraine, that interfered in the election, and on behalf of Trump.)
Last Friday, in the Great Hall of the Justice Department,
the president described his adversaries as “scum,” “savages,” and “Marxists,”
as well as “deranged,” “thugs,” “violent vicious lawyers,” and “a corrupt group
of hacks and radicals within the ranks of the American government.”
No one has any doubt what this means: The department is
under Trump’s personal control. As if to underscore the point, Attorney General
Pam Bondi, who called Trump “the greatest president in the history of our
country,” said she works “at the directive of Donald Trump.” The Justice
Department is Trump’s weapon for revenge. And his appetite for vengeance is
insatiable.
***
Revenge has long been a central theme for Donald Trump.
In a 1992 interview with
the journalist Charlie Rose, Trump was asked if he had regrets. Among them,
he told Rose, “I would have wiped the floor with the guys who weren’t loyal,
which I will now do. I love getting even with people.” When Rose interjected,
“Slow up. You love getting even with people?” Trump replied, “Absolutely.”
It’s one thing for a real-estate developer to act like a vindictive
narcissist; it’s entirely another for an American president to act that
way. And in Trump’s case, he’s been untethered in his second term in ways he
wasn’t in his first, when top aides were able to check some of his worst
tendencies. That won’t happen this time.
The threat this poses to American democracy is obvious. A
president and an administration with a Mafia mentality can create a Mafia
state. They can target innocent people, shut down dissent, intimidate
critics into silence, violate democratic norms, act without any statutory
authority, sweep away checks and balances, spread disinformation and conspiracy
theories, ignore court orders, and even declare martial law.
Whether all of these things will come to pass is
unknowable, because Trump is just getting started. But there is no reason to
believe that any internal checks will keep Trump or his administration from
crossing any lines. That’s especially the case since the Supreme Court issued a
ruling last year that provides a former president with immunity from
criminal prosecution for all “official acts” taken while in office. Trump and
MAGA world interpret this, and not without cause, as giving them carte blanche.
(Recall that Trump’s legal team suggested
that a president’s directive for SEAL Team Six to kill a political opponent
would be an action barred from prosecution, given a former executive’s broad
immunity.)
***
But something else, something quite far-reaching,
is going on as well. Trump is having a corrosive effect on the public’s civic
and moral sensibilities.
In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville, in
a section on corruption and the vices of rulers in a democracy, warned:
In a democracy private citizens
see a man of their own rank in life who rises from that obscure position in a
few years to riches and power; the spectacle excites their surprise and their
envy, and they are led to inquire how the person who was yesterday their equal
is today their ruler. To attribute his rise to his talents or his virtues is
unpleasant, for it is tacitly to acknowledge that they are themselves less
virtuous or less talented than he was. They are therefore led, and often
rightly, to impute his success mainly to some of his vices; and an odious
connection is thus formed between the ideas of turpitude and power,
unworthiness and success, utility and dishonor.
Tocqueville’s concern was that if citizens in a democracy
saw that unethical and corrupt behavior led to “riches and power,” this would
not only normalize such behavior; it would validate and even valorize it. The
“odious connection” between immoral behavior and worldly success would be first
made by the public, which would then emulate that behavior.
That is the great civic danger posed by Donald Trump,
that the habits of his heart become the habits of our hearts; that his code of
conduct becomes ours. That we delight in mistreating others almost as much as
he does. That vengeance becomes nearly as important to us as it is to him. That
dehumanization becomes de rigueur.
Tocqueville believed, as did the American Founders, that
religion would be the source of republican virtues. What they didn’t anticipate
was that religion might become a source of republican vices. What
happens when, in many cases, religion summons the darker, and sometimes the
darkest, impulses in people? When it is Christians who are excusing immoral
conduct in our leaders and spreading conspiracy theories, who are at best
silent at the decimation of humanitarian
programs that may well lead to millions of deaths and who at worst cheer it
on, and who champion a public figure who is shattering the load-bearing walls
of our democracy?
***
There is an important psychological component to all of
this as well. Trump’s vindictiveness—relentless, crude, and capricious—has
reshaped the emotional wiring of many otherwise good and decent people. He
tapped into their fears and activated ugly passions that in the past had been
kept at bay. In the process, he created a MAGA community that provides its
members with a sense of purpose and feelings of solidarity.
A clinical psychologist who asked for anonymity in order
to speak candidly told me that primal fear is an immediate, instinctual
response to perceived danger. Trump was reelected, at least in part, because
Americans were told for a very long time to feel very afraid. These Americans
believe they will lose their country without Trump. For those in MAGA world,
the feeling is: If you’re not for me and you’re not for Trump, you have no
place here.
The culture war is, for them, a real war, or very close
to it, and in real wars, rules have to be broken and enemies have to be
destroyed.
“We’re not reasonable,” Bannon told
my colleague David Brooks last year. “We’re unreasonable because we’re
fighting for a republic. And we’re never going to be reasonable until we get
what we achieve. We’re not looking to compromise. We’re looking to win.”
“Many people truly believe their country is under siege,”
the psychologist I reached out to told me, “and they must abandon compromise to
save their country. Decency, faith, compassion, and respect are irrelevant in
wartime. If one believes their livelihood and legacy is threatened, there is no
time for curiosity or compassion.”
My Atlantic colleague Jonathan Rauch wrote to me
that one thing that’s surprised him is, among Trump’s supporters, “the sheer
energy that’s generated by transgression. The joy of breaking stuff and hurting
people. It’s a million-volt battery.” He added: “I don’t think this ends after
Trump. He has raised a half generation of ambitious men and women who have been
(de)socialized by his style. The most successful businessman in the world is a
troll. It’s just what smart people do.”
***
In his first book written as president of the Czech and
Slovak Federal Republic, Václav Havel—a playwright, human-rights activist, and
dissident whose words shook the foundations of the Soviet empire—meditated on
politics, morality, and civility. He emphasized, again and again, “the moral
origins of all genuine politics.”
Some people considered him naive, a hopeless idealist,
but he pushed back. “Evil will remain with us,” Havel wrote, “no one will ever
eliminate human suffering, the political arena will always attract
irresponsible and ambitious adventurers and charlatans. And man will not stop
destroying the world. In this regard, I have no illusions.”
Havel went on: “Neither I nor anyone else will ever win
this war once and for all. At the very most, we can win a battle or two—and not
even that is certain. Yet I still think it makes sense to wage this war
persistently. It has been waged for centuries, and it will continue to be
waged—we hope—for centuries to come. This must be done on principle, because it
is the right thing to do.”
This 20th-century voice of conscience, who was arrested,
tried, and convicted of subversion and spent years in jail as a political
prisoner before he became president, wrote this near the end of an essay in Summer
Meditations:
So anyone who claims that I am a
dreamer who expects to transform hell into heaven is wrong. I have few
illusions. But I feel a responsibility to work towards the things I consider
good and right. I don’t know whether I’ll be able to change certain things for
the better, or not at all. Both outcomes are possible. There is only one thing
I will not concede: that it might be meaningless to strive in a good cause.
Our republic and its ideals are supremely good causes. We
should strive to protect them, which begins by speaking out for them, and by
trying to do, in whatever circumstances we find ourselves, what Havel did
during his ennobling and consequential life: to once again give depth and
dimension to notions such as love, friendship, compassion, humility, and
forgiveness. To refuse to live within the lie. And to awaken the goodwill that
is slumbering within our society.
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