“Revenge does take time”
Policy. We all know that’s what this presidential election is about. Fence-sitters like New York Times columnist Brett Stephens have inquiring minds. They want to know what policies Vice President Kamala Harris will pursue before voting for her. Even knowing the other entrée choice is, as humorist David Sedaris put it, “a platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it.”
Because everyone knows what Donald Trump’s policy agenda for his second term is: revenge. And lots of tariffs.
“I love getting even with people,” Trump told Charlie Rose in 1992, “if given the opportunity.”
Nothing has changed in the intervening years. Trump’s view of the world — of women especially, a pundit said this week — was frozen in amber in the late 1980s when his real estate empire was at its peak. On Trump’s revenge agenda should he win in November is an expanding list of enemies, many of whom he’s never met, against whom he holds grudges. People he wants rounded up by troops and deported. People he thinks should face military tribunals. Or IRS audits. Or federal investigations that upend lives. People he thinks should be put in jail for criticizing Supreme Court decisions or him.
This is not theoretical, Michael Schmidt wrote on Saturday in the New York Times. He sought to deploy the Department of Justice as a weapon for personal revenge in his first term. He was frustrated, albeit not entirely, by advisers who sought to stall, dissuade, and divert him:
In an Oval Office meeting, Mr. Trump told startled aides that if Attorney General Jeff Sessions would not order the department to go after Hillary Clinton and James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, Mr. Trump would prosecute them himself.
Recognizing the extraordinary dangers of a president seeking not just to weaponize the criminal justice system for political ends but trying as well to assume personal control over who should be investigated and charged, the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, sought to stall.
Those efforts were not entirely successful. Schmidt and Matthew Cullen detailed ten people on Trump’s enemies list eventually hit with punitive actions that disrupted their lives and cost hundreds of thousands in fines and legal fees.
MSNBC’s “Deadline White House” opened on Monday with a montage of Trump’s musings on revenge. Treason is punishable by death in the Constitution, a reporter noted in May 2019: “Who specifically are you accusing of treason?”
Trump didn’t blink. He cited a list of people he felt had wronged him who should be charged with treason (extremely loosely defined).
“Revenge does take time,” Trump told “Dr. Phil Primetime.”
Trump is biding his. If he wins a second term and anyone opposes him, he told a rally last September, he’ll order his attorney general to indict them.
He’ll go full Queen of Hearts given a second chance at the Oval Office.