Something notable happened this week. Victims of Donald Trump’s retribution campaign (including recently targeted individuals, institutions, and nations) each found his self-destruct button. And they pushed it.
I have spent the better part of a decade as close as you can possibly get to Trump’s revenge machine. First, I witnessed it from inside his administration, regularly working to stop Trump’s efforts to break the law (I, for one, had no keen interest in going to prison for him); then I experienced it as one of his targets.
If there were such a thing as a PhD in revenge studies, I’d have earned it twice over. Probably thrice. But in any event, I can give you the entirety of my dissertation in a single sentence: nothing on earth scares Donald Trump like an opponent who fights back.
I’ve analyzed just about every case you can think of. I spent years warning about it and, in Trump’s second term, monitored his weaponization of presidential powers to carry out his personal grievances against tens of thousands — maybe hundreds of thousands — of individuals, institutions, and nation states. There’s no comparison in American history whatsoever. We don’t even need to invoke the names of “other” presidents known for vindictiveness, because Trump is in a league of his own.
In all the cases I’ve scoured, something remarkable tends to happen the moment a target stands their ground. Trump starts to come apart. He overcorrects. He crashes the clown car into the median. And when it’s all said and done, he defeats himself.
It’s taken the rest of the country (and the world) a long time to learn this lesson. Most have not followed the sequence. Being targeted by the most powerful man in the world is scary, which is why you’ve seen a lot of people capitulate to or settle with Trump. In the cosmic battle between what is right and what is easy, they’ve acted like there was never an option. They just did the latter.
But this week, it became clearer than ever that Trump’s victims are no longer coming to the negotiating table. They’re flipping the table over.
We saw an individual do it. Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook, whom Trump has twice tried to fire on trumped-up mortgage fraud claims, didn’t resign quietly. She sued, won at the Supreme Court, and this week her lawyers answered his second removal attempt by pointing out that Trump himself (along with his Treasury secretary and his attorney general) signed the very same kind of contradictory “primary residence” mortgage paperwork he claims makes her unfit to serve.
“Surely the President does not believe himself ‘unfit for office,’” her counsel wrote. Trump reached for a weapon and basically handed it to his target.
We also saw an institution do the same. When military news publication Stars and Stripes broke the story of the mental health crisis aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, the Pentagon’s response was to move to fire the paper’s leadership and seize control of a newsroom that has served American troops since the Civil War. Trump had been But the journalists didn’t throw in the towel. This week, they sued on First Amendment grounds, and in the process, they basically ensured that the story about the USS Lincoln and the administration’s censorship campaign will continue to get a thousand times more attention than if the Pentagon had let it go.
And finally, entire nation-states are fighting back. Canada spent months watching Trump pile tariff upon tariff on them and other countries around the world. The quiet and thoughtful northerners spent a lot of that time trying to peacefully resolve the situation with characteristic Canadian courtesy. This week, Ottawa decided they’d had enough. They called Trump’s bluff, slapping counter-tariffs on twenty billion dollars’ worth of American goods.
Trump’s flailing and petulant response? He signed an executive order renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America.” If he thought cartography revisions would somehow get his leverage back, he was wrong. Even the map companies were ready to defy him. “We’re not changing it,” wrote the company MapQuest on social media, pasting a map screenshot of Lake Ontario with the body of water renamed Lake Are We Doing This Again?. “Name it whatever you want at your leisure.”
The clown car has hit the median. Again.
Contrast this with the first year of Trump’s second term, when his targets were far more likely to settle with him. We will not soon forget the white-shoe law firms that pledged a billion dollars in free legal services to escape Trump’s executive orders… the universities that wrote nine-figure checks to make his threats go away… the television networks that paid millions to settle lawsuits their own lawyers considered frivolous… or the allied nations that raced to accept lopsided trade deals rather than endure his tantrums. The president felt emboldened that his extortion was working, and as a result, every capitulation bought the next target a worse deal.
No longer. The targets have enrolled in “revenge studies” themselves. And now that they’ve figured him out, Trump is genuinely terrified.
If you doubt it, I’m just going to point you back to what I think is the most revealing story of the week. Jared Kushner requested a meeting with Hakeem Jeffries, and I can tell you firsthand that a meeting like that doesn’t happen without the president’s knowledge. The focus of the secret summit was reportedly on seeking “common ground,” during which Kushner urged Jeffries to also sit down with White House chief of staff Susie Wiles.
You don’t need a PhD to know what’s going on here. Trump is trying to cut a deal with Democrats to blunt the scrutiny he knows is coming. The meeting surfaced just days after reports that Democrats are planning to put Trump-family corruption at the center of congressional probes if they win the House. The same Donald Trump who called Jeffries a “low IQ individual” and a “THUG” who is a “danger to our Country” is suddenly striking a softer tone and dispatching family members to make nice.
That ain’t strength, folks. That’s fear.
So how do you scare the living daylights out of Donald Trump? You fight back. I made the case yesterday that Democrats should lean into this moment and put a real fighter — a major national figure — in the role of Speaker of the House. When the gavel changes hands, the investigations that follow should be the most sweeping congressional probes in American history, because the gravity of Trump’s crimes demands nothing less. In 250 years, we’ve never seen corruption on this scale from an American president.
If the Democrats do that right, I can promise you one thing. The political opposition won’t actually need to “defeat” Donald Trump.
He will defeat himself.
Your friend, in defiance,
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