Trump’s Tour of Revenge Against the American People
Building on his walk-and-talk video from a couple of days ago, Jamelle Bouie writes about two of the easiest things to understand about Donald Trump. 1. The way in which “his every executive function exists to satisfy his ego”:
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.
2. His desire for revenge:
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.
As I wrote a few days ago about Trump’s Oval Office ambush of Zelenskyy:
It occurs to me after reading about the meeting that Trump’s actions here are partially motivated by a desire for personal retribution against Zelenskyy for not helping him smear Biden in 2019. Zelenskyy told Trump no and Trump wants revenge — and he’s gonna turn his back on Ukraine and Europe to get it.
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