Ben D’Andrea
Star-Spangled Revenge
The President of the United States doesn’t suffer from the same memory loss that afflicted Michel de Montaigne four centuries ago. In his essay on liars, the French writer complained about the “misery and inconvenience” of his poor memory. He’d run into trouble with friends after forgetting to do what he’d promised. Still, he saw several upsides to his cognitive “infirmity,” among them the quirk of forgetting personal insults. Memory lapses à la Montaigne are blessings if they preclude noxious grudges and the moral degradation of plotting retaliation. Vengeance relies on a trusty memory.
Unlike the forgetful essayist of the 16th century, Donald Trump isn’t prone to overlooking slights, real or perceived. A long-suffering victim in his own mind of countless humiliations and insults, he leans on the despotic strategy for blocking even slight hints of disrespect: threats of retribution. An iron rule for consolidating power is to sow fear of retaliation. “I am master of all!” declared one tyrant described by ancient Greek philosopher Epictetus. “All men pay respect to me.” Fear amplifies the despot. At the start of his second presidency, Trump said in an interview with The Atlantic magazine: “I run the country and the world.”
To be effective, threats should instill paralyzing fear of harsh retribution, and to do that they need the backing of a solid record of fulfillment. In just one example among countless that prove Trump’s extortionate threats make the grade, he warned Republican senators to support the bill that would cancel federal grants to, as he put it in a July 2025 Truth Social post, the “horrible and completely biased” public broadcasters NPR and PBS: “Any Republican that votes to allow this monstrosity to continue broadcasting will not have my support or endorsement.” Only two Senate Republicans defied the president by voting against the bill.
For a retaliator at the opposite end from Montaigne’s good-natured appeaser, one who is “moderate in his revenges, gentle in resenting injuries,” verbal threats also yield psychological benefits. First, they avert further humiliating blows to a fragile ego. Second, they anticipate the thrill — to which the avowed revenge-seeker seems addicted — of getting even with perceived enemies. To state the obvious, threats are a wicked pleasure, weaker than that of actual retaliation, to be sure, but fiendishly self-delighting nonetheless, like a rat-catcher’s gleeful mumbling in anticipation of a gratifying death blow.
Also obvious: Trump harasses mainly Democrats, his so-called “radical left lunatics.” At a summer 2025 dinner with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, Trump said of Zohran Mamdani, the then Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City: “He better behave.” Then he hinted at funding cuts if Mamdani took control of city hall: “He needs the money through the White House. He needs a lot.” Trump is the vindictive Santa Claus warning Democrats of empty space under the Christmas tree.
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In the political arena, as in schoolyards, revenge-seekers pepper their threats with personal insults to mark their targets as zealots who deserve punishment. Trump has attacked Mamdani as a “100-percent Communist lunatic.” The communist epithet remains effective post-Cold War for stoking opposition to perceived enemies of capitalism and the American way of life. He lobbed the same slur at Kamala Harris, his opponent in the 2024 presidential election.
Trump’s name-calling is often excused as his joking style, meant only to energize his base. In this view, belittling opponents as “sick,” “crazy,” and “mentally impaired” — as Trump has done — is just partisan banter. But in the U.S. the communist label has a fraught history of being used to crush political opponents.
Early in the 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy charged without proof that communists had infiltrated the State Department and the U.S. Army. The Wisconsin senator exploited the ensuing investigations to stoke fear of espionage allegedly rooted deep within government. Defamed as traitors to America, government workers, artists, and entertainers lost their jobs.
The resurgence of the epithet “communist” as Trump’s convenient one-word ambush doesn’t mean, of course, that a Marxist-Leninist takeover stands a better-than-remote chance now than it did in McCarthy’s day. Nor have the injustices committed by communist regimes recently filled the average American mind with renewed foreboding. As Trump instinctively knows, the communist put-down still works today to stir up latent dread of being denied the material gifts — such as Trump himself possesses in abundance — promised by free-market capitalism. The illusory threat of communism awakens dread, highly manipulable and never wholly conquerable, not of attacks on liberty or free markets, but of being denied that most deeply cherished of all American values: boundless material prosperity. A Trump-size fortune quells all fears, solves all problems.
With his vast holdings in real estate, the President confirms that in America fabulous wealth grants, even to a convicted felon, the safe status of an untouchable. Rolling in money, owning exclusive golf courses and luxurious private jets has the magical power of conjuring up virtue — like public spirit, honour, good will — where none exists. In America, wealth is status and merit.
The great source of shame in America is privation, or being too poor to afford a second car. Admiration for financial success, epitomized by resort mansions like Mar-a-Lago, runs deep in American culture. Only un-American social democrats, no doubt green with envy, or perhaps monks contemptuous of worldly treasure, would dare suspect jiggery-pokery behind the massing of extravagant fortunes.
A recurring make-believe generated as if by America’s consumerist psyche turns affluence into an inherent good, an end in itself, exempt from ethical judgment. As the “capitalist bully” preaches in G.B. Shaw’s 1902 stage play, Mrs. Warren’s Profession: “But while we’re in this world we’re in it; and money’s money.” A large portion of the electorate, loath to ask inconvenient questions about how Trump accumulated his myriad properties, re-legitimized, in a surge of collective self-deception during the 2024 presidential election, this fantasy of wealth’s unimpeachability. Unfortunately, paying homage to wealth only serves to extend its corrupting power.
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Credible threats from a capitalist bully paralyzes business rivals and political opponents alike. And while not aimed directly at voters in a presidential election, such threats have the power to motivate those electors similarly disposed toward revenge. “[It] is well known,” wrote social theorist Georges Sorel in Reflections on Violence, “that vengeance is a sentiment of extraordinary power, especially with the weak.”
As expected of a cynic from the Old World, Sorel was under no illusion that voters make decisions based on reason and the whole truth rather than ugly emotions like revenge. The disenfranchised and bitter among Trump supporters may not have the clout to get even with their foes — a vague assortment of progressive “elites” — but they can vote for Trump as their deliverer and nemesis. With predictable self-glorification, the sovereign lord of Mar-a-Lago shrewdly promised them: “I am your retribution.”
The instinct for retaliation, though impossible to measure with any accuracy, is a psychological factor at least as influential among the voting masses as it is in Trump’s moneyed empire. The mania for retaliation may spring to life even more forcibly among the powerless than among the super-rich who, like Trump, can count on well-financed lawsuits to exact their pound of flesh. As all the world knows, that angry mob urged by Trump to “fight like hell” stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
However, not just anyone with a good memory for personal insults can assume the mantle of vengeance for an embittered multitude. Republican voters often cite Trump’s thriving businesses as the main reason for endorsing him. The ideal avenger in America is a businessman, that is, someone who stands a much better chance of getting away with lies than a politician. Trump represents that trusted marvel of American evolution: the self-made entrepreneur who doesn’t blush easily, and wears his revenge lightly, as a matter of course.
After crisscrossing the U.S. for several months in 1890, French sociologist Paul de Rousiers wrote: “Big businessmen have been able to escape punishment because in their hour of success they were clever enough to make friends in all circles.” Like an exploitive magnate of America’s Gilded Age used to chomping on the lion’s share, convicted felon Trump profits by the silence or connivance of those Republicans who share with him the limited psychology of money-grubbers. In Trump country, felony convictions may be shrugged off if the hacienda’s furnishings are lavish enough. The robber barons of the 19th century who engaged in unscrupulous business practices also amassed admirers.
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The disastrous susceptibility of discontented Americans to the tactics of a tycoon-demagogue calls to mind Monsieur Sorel’s pointed question: “Is it not one of the dogmas of democracy that the genius of demagogues can overcome all obstacles?” A cultural climate of revenge, sustained by a tenacious myth about wealth in America, has enabled a business tycoon to wield presidential power as a means of personal retribution.
Luckily, not all revenge is akin to, in the old-timey sense, pure wickedness. Its gentler form may yet assert itself in the next election to restore America’s national dignity.
