There's a Single Objective Behind Everything Donald Trump Does. It's a Problem for Democrats—and an Opportunity.
This is part of Revenge Week , a series about how vengeance runs America, from the White House to cheating spouses to that bad boss who totally deserved it.
A Democrat, located in the wild, is usually thinking defensively. The party's reason to exist, in this moment, is to preserve and protect social programs and basic rights; it strives to achieve these ironically conservative goals without offending or scaring so much as a single swing voter. Even its less risk-averse figures—its Bernie Sanderses and Zohrans Mamdani—often frame their proposals as defenses of working- and middle-class Americans besieged by the cost of living in a rigged economy. There was a brief window in 2019 and 2020 in which major Democrats talked about fighting and attacking. The party's primary voters themselves shut that right down , consolidating around Joe Biden in order to head off the possibility of a pugilistic Sanders or Elizabeth Warren nomination.
But the Republican—the Donald Trump Republican—is a different animal, with a different mindset. True, they see themselves as restoring the country to a bygone state of greatness and ostensibly protecting a deserving “real American” population from various threats. But these threats range from the exaggerated to the fictitious. In practice, the party's goals are to hunt, attack, embarrass, and intimidate—simply put, to take revenge on anyone who has ever made the president or his most powerful adviser feel uncomfortable. (The adviser would be deputy chief of staff and de facto ICE overlord Stephen Miller, who wrote a letter to a local newspaper as a teenager to complain about hearing Spanish spoken at his high school in the city of “Santa Monica,” whose name has remarkably not yet been changed by executive fiat to “Saint Monica.”)
This was obvious, to be sure, during Trump's first term. His main legislative priority, outside of tax cuts, was repealing the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. Why, given that he often proved that he had little to no understanding of how the ACA worked or what might replace it? (He once reportedly wandered out of the Oval Office entirely , requiring Vice President Mike Pence to retrieve him, while former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan was trying to explain the ins and outs of the legislation.) Simple: Obamacare had Obama's name on it, and Obama was an enemy of Trump's, so it had to go. When the late Republican Sen. John McCain voted down the repeal, he too became a marked man; MAGA acolyte Kari Lake would later run for Arizona's Republican Senate nomination with a mission to drive McCain's supporters out of the party .
Trump 1.0's most notable initiatives besides ACA repeal were the “ Muslim ban ,” the family separation policy , and his inept attempt to blackmail Ukraine . The purpose of all three was retribution. The first was originally a response to a mass shooting in California perpetrated by a Muslim couple. The second was meant to retaliate against adults who crossed the border without authorization. (It's telling that Trump has never completed the “border wall,” which would serve a preemptive and defensive purpose, instead prioritizing high-visibility quasi-military actions against individuals who are already inside the country.) The third, in Trump's mind, was a means of evening the score with the Ukrainian government over its role—which, having been conceived in loony-tunes message board world, was entirely imaginary —in framing Russia for the dirty tricks campaign against Hillary Clinton.
But the embarrassment of losing the 2020 election and being prosecuted for attempting to overturn it supercharged Trump's revenge drive. His second term features exponentially more payback per day than the first.
After taking the oath of office again, Trump pardoned and freed Jan. 6 convicts; he's also made a lot of official-looking noises about investigating the groups and individuals who investigated him . His economic policy consists of the stochastic announcement of giant tariffs against which ever country or continent he has most recently gotten upset at for “ripping off” the United States, as well as periodic attempts to humiliate the chairman of the Federal Reserve into resigning. His domestic policy bill singles out for reversal clean energy advances made by his Democratic predecessor . To the extent he has a foreign policy, it is to harass critics of Israel . His most lasting and consequential “achievement” may be defunding critical foreign aid and domestic medical research programs on the basis of specious if not outright delusional accusations that they were involved in advancing Marxism, transgender ideology, and critical race theory. (Trump and Trumpists are often shooting at ghosts and hitting the real people who are standing behind them.) He also, for some reason, keeps trying to shut down Harvard.
For Democrats, this revenge fixation is both a challenge and an opportunity. It is a challenge because Trump is playing an entirely different game than they are. Their party sees politics as a process of seeking consensus through judicious attention to public opinion trends ; he, in contrast, simply assumes the support of a mythical American majority as a matter of faith. All his policies—literally all of them —are unpopular, and most are “divisive” in the sense of triggering strong emotions related to cultural identity. The average Democratic strategist would rather die than be involved in advocating programs like these. Faced with MAGA proposals, Democrats marshal public opinion against them; they often do this effectively, so far as it goes, only to find that Trump does not care or believe that public opinion is against him, and does the thing anyway . (There are some funny exceptions to this: If Trump catches wind via cable news that he's done something really unpopular, like sending the stock market to hell with the tariff stuff, he will simply claim to not be doing it and to have never intended to do it in the first place. The defining original example of this is his having run in 2016 on the premise that he had been smart enough to identify George W. Bush's plan to invade Iraq as a disaster, when, in fact, he had not .)
The opportunity is, well, most of these things are unpopular, and House elections are held every two years. Lake is a two-time loser . The determinative swing cohort of American voters elected Trump not so that he could let the country's weirdest crime guys out of jail and shut down Alzheimer's research but rather so that he could end inflation—something he has not spent much time working on, relative to the amount of time he has spent attacking Los Angeles with horses . There's an opening in Trump's approval rating chart big enough to drive a truck through . By 2028, Democrats may even have a few candidates emboldened enough to propose that the party get some revenge of its own.
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