A couple of weeks after joining his party’s national ticket, then-Sen. JD Vance was eager to ease the minds of voters concerned about Donald Trump and his retaliatory tactics. Trump, the future vice president told Fox News, is “not a vengeful guy.”
At the time, it was a bizarre assertion, contradicted by voluminous evidence of Trump routinely seeking revenge against political foes — real and imagined. But six months after Vance’s curious claim, his rhetoric appears even more ridiculous. NBC News reported:
For those who may have crossed President Donald Trump, the message is sinking in: Payback is coming, and coming fast. … A question that loomed over Trump’s 2024 campaign was whether he’d use presidential powers for retribution against his perceived political foes. For some, the answer has arrived.
To be sure, some of the new president’s retaliatory tactics appear petty but ultimately inconsequential. The White House, for example, reportedly requested the removal of a Pentagon portrait honoring retired Gen. Mark Milley, who served as Trump’s handpicked chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff before the president turned on him. Similarly, the Republican canceled a variety of former officials’ security clearances as part of an apparent political tantrum, which didn’t amount to much, since some of the former officials didn’t appear to have active security clearances anyway.
He also raised the prospect of going after Joe Biden, though that sounded more like wishful thinking than a meaningful plan.
But some of Trump’s efforts to settle scores are far more serious. For example, the Biden administration provided John Bolton, a former White House national security adviser, with a Secret Service detail following assassination threats from Iran. Trump, who now sees Bolton as an enemy, yanked the protective detail last week.
The new president did the same thing for former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; Brian Hook, former special envoy to Iran; and Dr. Anthony Fauci. Asked by a reporter if he’d feel partially responsible if something awful were to happen to any of these former officials, Trump said he would not, adding, “Certainly, I would not take responsibility.”
When Trump sat down with NBC News’ “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker for a post-election interview, the Republican tried to sound reasonable. “I’m not looking to go back into the past,” he said. “I’m looking to make our country successful. Retribution will be through success.”
A month later, I have some bad news for those who took the comments seriously.
A New York Times analysis noted that the examples from the last week, when taken together, “send a clear signal that Mr. Trump feels unconstrained about punishing the disloyal, that he is potentially willing to go further against his enemies than he had pledged on the campaign trail and that there will be a price for any opposition to come.”
The same analysis added that his retaliatory tactics are intended “not just to impose punishment for the past but also to intimidate anyone who might cross him in the future.”
The Times quoted Lindsay Chervinsky, executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library and the author of several books on the presidency, who noted, “The theme of this week was vengeance and retribution when all other presidents have used their inaugurations to heal wounds, bring people together and focus on the future. That sounds like a norm, but it’s actually fundamental to the survival of the republic.”
There’s no reason to assume that this will improve anytime soon. On the contrary, the president has nominated a partisan operative named Kash Patel as the next FBI director, and Patel is the author of a notorious enemies list.
