For Trump, revenge is a completely rational strategy, consistent with his other efforts to consolidate power. “IF YOU COME FOR ME, I WILL COME FOR YOU!” he wrote in Truth Social in August 2023, and of course he went after his enemies, to considerable effect. He cowed an entire political party into obsequious submission and had some success doing the same to universities, the media, law firms and other institutions. If voters in 2024 thought his threats were just bluster, now they should know that, as Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski said: “retribution is real“
While there is no mystery about Trump's interest in revenge, there is a larger, more complex question about American politics and culture. How did we get to the point where one of the two major parties and just over half the voters were willing to give power to a leader who openly intended revenge and was now using public power to do so?
When Trump promises retribution to his aggrieved supporters, he is promising a reckoning for the transformation in American life brought about by progressive trends in liberalism since the mid-twentieth century. This transformation involved more than just racial changes, although that is where it all began. The black freedom struggle in the mid-twentieth century began a series of movements that upended almost all traditional hierarchies: whites over blacks, men over women, straights over gays, religious over non-religious, and more secular. Liberals and progressives have challenged virtually the entire system of social priority: who stands above, who comes first, whose values and interests align with all of America. They undertook this astonishingly ambitious project in a country where the fear of being humiliated, captured, castrated, “half-breeded” or deprived of historical privileges and immunities has always been a powerful source of political reaction.
