How the Establishment Is Helping Trump’s Revenge-athon

President Donald Trump holds a signed executive order in the White House on April 8, 2025, in Washington. Evan Vucci/AP

Let’s go back to June 2, 2024. That morning, Fox & Friends Weekend aired an interview with Donald Trump conducted by the show’s hosts—Pete Hegseth, Rachel Campos-Duffy, and Will Cain. Three days earlier, Trump was found guilty in his porn-star/hush-money case. (Remember, he’s a convicted felon!) And Campos-Duffy brought up a subject that’s long been of great interest to Trump: revenge. As I’ve written many times, Trump’s three most powerful psychological motivations are revenge, revenge, and revenge. (Last month in this newsletter, I traced some of his history as a “revenge junkie.”) In the aftermath of the verdict that found Trump guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records to hide his $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels, Campos-Duffy gently prodded him: “You [previously] said, ‘My revenge will be success for America.’ You just had this verdict. Do you still feel the same?”

“It’s a really tough question in one way because these are bad people,” Trump replied, referring to his critics and those who had brought criminal cases against him. “These people are sick.” He rambled about how tough he was and bragged about how during his first term he had fired FBI Director Jim Comey. He then returned to the issue of retribution: “Look it’s a very interesting question. I say it, and it sounds beautiful: ‘My revenge will be success.’ I mean that. But it’s awfully hard when you see what they’ve done. These people are so evil.”

A far-too-sympathetic Cain tried to push Trump toward a clearer answer. “I hear you struggling with it. I hear you say it’s a tough question—a bit unsure. You famously said, regarding Hillary Clinton, ‘Lock her up.’ You declined to do that as president.”

Trump responded: “I beat her. It’s easier when you win. They all said lock her up and I could’ve done it. But I thought that would have been a terrible thing. And then this [verdict] happened to me. So, I may feel differently about it. I can’t tell you. I’m not sure I can answer the question.”

Here was a more interesting and revealing exchange than most of Trump’s softball sessions with Fox sycophants. He was still tethered to his lifelong obsession with revenge—if they screw you, screw ’em back 10 times worse, he often said when asked to describe his key to business success—but he knew it was unwise to vow vengeance during his comeback campaign. Yet he could not promise to abandon revenge altogether, as if he realized it was impossible for him to pass up an opportunity for retribution. In a rare (for him) moment, he said he could not provide a firm answer. He seemed to be saying, “It would be great to promise I won’t be fixated on vengeance if I’m elected president, but I know me—and that ain’t me.”

It sure isn’t. Trump cannot escape his compulsions, and perhaps his most powerful one is to get even. It was always obvious that score-settling would be job No. 1, should he return to the White House. An insecure man who’s always had a chip on his shoulder the size of a mountain, he’s defined his life by his relentless accounting and pursuit of grudges. The only surprise has been that his revenge-athon has been so extensive, so vicious, and that it has been so successful and generated such little pushback.

Trump has abused the power of the presidency to go after his enemies in ways Richard Nixon could never have imagined. He has pulled security details and/or security clearances from his political opponents and critics, such as John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and others. He has extorted law firms that employed lawyers who previously challenged him politically or legally, and in mob-boss fashion he has forced them to pledge hundreds of millions of dollars in free legal services to his favorite causes (other than himself).

This past week, Trump signed executive orders targeting two officials who served in his first administration: Chris Krebs, who was then the nation’s cybersecurity chief, and Miles Taylor, a Department of Homeland Security official who anonymously wrote an op-ed and then a book criticizing Trump. The president called Taylor a traitor and instructed the Justice Department to investigate him. Krebs’ sin was having declared the 2020 election, which Trump lost, free of fraud. Trump went so far as to revoke security clearances for employees of SentinelOne, a cybersecurity firm where Krebs now works. Trump has also trained his ire on universities (including Columbia University, Brown University, Harvard University, Princeton University, and the University of Pennsylvania, his alma mater), cultural institutions (the Kennedy Center and the Smithsonian Institution), and assorted news organizations.

In any previous era, this orgy of vengeance would be the top political story. Yet with the flood of Trump-spurred outrages underway since January 20, it does not dominate the headlines. Moreover, the surrender of many of his targets undermines criticism of Trump’s revenge frenzy. Trump has used the capitulation of these law firms as proof that he is right to assail them as hotbeds of evil scheming that threatens the nation. On Wednesday, he claimed that the settlements signed by these firms—some previously associated with Democratic causes—was proof the 2020 election was stolen from him: “The election was rigged. It’s been proven...When you look at all these lawyers and law firms that are signing, giving us hundreds of millions of dollars. It was proven by so many different ways...It was a very corrupt election.”

Of course, Trump was lying about that. But embedded in that lie was an important point. By yielding and offering Trump hundreds of millions of dollars in pro bono work, these firms were indeed bolstering the notion they had done something wrong—whatever that may have been—when they had not. Each white flag waved in the face of a Trump attack strengthens him and his authoritarian bullying.

When Trump first targeted Paul, Weiss, that law firm explored joining with other firms to mount a united front against Trump’s assault. But it quickly folded, and that effort evaporated. Reuters reported on Thursday that the cybersecurity industry was declining to rally behind SentinelOne and Krebs. Columbia University complied with Trump strong-arming last month by agreeing to a list of onerous demands from Trump to regain the $400 million in federal funding he suspended. Was that sufficient? Absolutely not. In response, the Trump White House did not resume the funding and raised the prospect of slapping a consent decree on Columbia that would place the school even more so under the thumb of the administration. Feed the leopard, and the leopard wants more. (Brown, Princeton, and Harvard have told Trump to get lost.)

ABC News settled with Trump ($15 million); Meta settled with Trump ($25 million). CBS has been considering settling a case that Trump filed against its news division. It’s all encouragement for worse and more dangerous conduct. On Sunday night, after 60 Minutes aired two stories about Trump, he called on Brendan Carr, his loyalist running the Federal Communications Commission, to revoke CBS’ broadcast license. (In his first days as FCC chief, Carr ordered investigations of NPR and PBS.)

What the last few weeks have taught Trump is not only that revenge is sweet; it’s also so easy! Why cease? Many of his foes fold, and there’s been no political cost for his perversions of power. Republicans and conservatives once were eager to decry excessive presidential flexing. They screamed about Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden issuing too many executive orders and governing through these directives. Remember the outrage when Biden tried to wipe out some student debt through an executive order? Now these fretters about presidential abuses are silent. As are those Republicans and right-wingers who in the past railed about the so-called “weaponization” of government, such as, notably, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio). Trump is literally exploiting his position to demean and destroy his detractors and his perceived enemies, even ordering the Justice Department to investigate a critic. Yet...crickets.

I know: You are stunned by the hypocrisy.

I don’t expect these careerist MAGA cultists to make a peep. But I confess I am disappointed in the Establishment: those law firms, universities, media organizations, and corporate leaders who are either bending the knee or not protesting Trump’s arguably illegal blackmail operation. With their silence, they are all complicit in Trump’s war on America and enabling his march toward autocracy. “This is the Vichy moment. It’s a classic collaborationist dilemma,” says Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, which has not yet been assaulted by Trump. “You can have preserved your school, but you live in a sea of authoritarianism.”

Trump’s latest attack on a law firm (as of this writing) demonstrated how absurd and dangerous is the mad king. His target was Susman Godfrey, and the executive order he signed denounced the firm for alleged efforts to “weaponize the American legal system and degrade the quality of American elections.” Like similar directives, it did not specify the firm’s supposed misdeeds. But we know why Trump is after it. Susman Godfrey successfully represented Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News in the defamation case that accused the right-wing network of knowingly spreading Trump’s lies about the 2020 election and won the company a $787 million settlement from Fox. It also has represented Dominion in lawsuits against Rudy Giuliani, former Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell, and others who peddled pro-Trump conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. And it has handled Dominion’s similar lawsuit against Newsmax.

Here's another way for Trump to keep fighting for his Big Lie—and to punish those who have helped expose it as utter bullcrap. (The executive order also excoriates Susman Godfrey for offering financial awards and employment opportunities to “students of color.”) As with the other firms on his hit list, Trump ordered the suspension of security clearances held by its attorneys, limited government interactions with the firm, and barred its lawyers’ access to federal buildings.

Susman, to its credit, is fighting back, as are Perkins Coie, WilmerHale, and Jenner & Block. These other law firms, each a target of a similar executive order, have sued Trump and won preliminary rulings that found Trumps’ directives violated the Constitution. In the lawsuit Susman filed against the Trump administration on Friday, it summarized the emergency at hand:

In America we have, in the words of John Adams, a government of laws and not men. President Trump’s campaign of Executive Orders against law firms and others, including the Executive Order he signed on April 9, 2025 against Susman Godfrey, is a grave threat to this foundational premise of our Republic. The President is abusing the powers of his office to wield the might of the Executive Branch in retaliation against organizations and people that he dislikes. Nothing in our Constitution or laws grants a President such power; to the contrary, the specific provisions and overall design of our Constitution were adopted in large measure to ensure that presidents cannot exercise arbitrary, absolute power in the way that the President seeks to do in these Executive Orders.”

The firm added: “If President Trump’s Executive Orders are allowed to stand, future presidents will face no constraint when they seek to retaliate against a different set of perceived foes. What for two centuries has been beyond the pale will become the new normal. Put simply, this could be any of us.”

More than 500 law firms and hundreds of law professors and former judges have filed amicus briefs to support the law firms Trump has attacked. Still, many leaders in the legal world and elsewhere have stayed mum, cowed by Trump. It ought to be a point of widespread consensus: A president should not use the authority of the federal government to pursue his personal vendettas. In fact, Trump’s flagrant abuse of power might constitute an impeachable offense.

So far, Trump has (mostly) gotten away with it. Even if he loses in court, he has blackballed law firms, and potential clients with interests before the federal government have been sent a signal: Don’t hire these guys. The acquiescence and silence, no doubt, emboldens Trump. Who know who he’ll come after next? Corporations, nonprofits, Hollywood studios, think tanks? With many in the powers-that-be class yielding to Trump’s revenge-palooza or declining to protest it, there’s likely no end in sight. After all, a junkie is always looking for the next fix.

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland.corn@gmail.com.

Adolescence. I was recently in Los Angeles, and every dinner or lunch conversation there, as it usually does, turned to this all-important question: What have you watched recently? There was much discussion of White Lotus and the recent Academy Award–winning films. But each gabfest eventually landed on Adolescence, the four-episode British crime drama streaming on Netflix. And the comments all fell into one of two categories: It’s absolutely fantastic, or I am watching it this weekend. I’ve not heard such buzz about a show in a long while, and maybe you’ve heard it, too. I can report, it is entirely warranted.

Adolescence starts with the arrest in an English town of mild-mannered 13-year-old Jamie Miller (magnificent first-time actor Owen Cooper), who is charged with murdering a female schoolmate. The show, created and written by playwright Jack Thorne and actor Stephen Graham, follows no conventions of the genre. It is not a procedural. It is not a whodunit. It is not fast-paced and full of sly plot twists. It is mostly an examination of how this crime affects Jamie’s family and others, including the lead detective on the case. Each episode dives deeply into one of its many crevices. The first covers the arrest and the initial shock wave to the Miller family. The second transpires three days after the murder, as the two investigators working the case visit the school Jamie and the victim attended. They are searching for reasons why Jamie might have committed this heinous act and that entails making sense of online teenage life, which includes bullying and the impact of toxic masculinity and misogyny propagated by such social media influencers as Andrew Tate. The next installment gives us Jamie and a forensic psychologist (Briony Ariston) in a session seven months later and could stand alone as a brilliant piece of stage theater. The final episode returns to the family over a year after the crime.

Each of these chapters is a one-shot take, with the camera following the characters in and out of rooms and buildings, switching from one player to another. It’s incredibly ingenious and much more than a gimmick. The real-time presentation of these moments plucked out of what is a long emotional saga crystallizes the overlapping sorrows, tragedies, contradictions, consequences, and challenges generated by the crime. The writing is exquisite, and the acting superb, especially with Graham as Jamie’s father, Christine Tremarco as Jamie’s mum, and Amélie Pease as his older sister.  

This fascinating and intense piece of work illustrates how solid writing, acting, directing, and cinematography can be transformative. The series quickly became the most watched streaming show in the United Kingdom and, with its exploration of the influence of the so-called manosphere on adolescent boys, sparked political conversation throughout the nation. Prime Minister Keir Starmer urged Brits to view it, writing on X, "As a father, watching Adolescence with my teenage son and daughter hit home hard.” He supported free screenings of the series in UK secondary schools. Not surprisingly, Elon Musk ridiculously called the show “anti-white propaganda” because a white actor was cast as Jamie.

In our world of media over-hype, it’s reassuring when hype is deserved. If the Adolescence wave hasn’t hit you yet, consider this as a public service announcement. Here is a series that ought not be missed.

Amy Sherald: American Sublime, Whitney Museum of American Art. With Donald Trump declaring war on the National Museum of African American History and Culture and with the US Naval Academy removing from its library Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and other books deemed too DEI-ish (that is, too Black), now is the perfect time for the Whitney Museum’s new exhibition: Amy Sherald: American Sublime. Sherald, a painter who hails from Columbus, Georgia, burst into national prominence when her official portrait of Michelle Obama was unveiled at the National Portrait Gallery in 2018.

Courtesy of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery

Soon after, her paintings—mostly portraits of Black people—began selling for millions of dollars. Her work contemplates and celebrate the everyday Black experience in American life. With her subjects often looking straight at the viewer dispassionately yet evincing a rich interior life, the paintings deliberately evoke an Edward Hopper–like quality. Sherald found inspiration in a mundane source: the snapshot. As the museum’s description of the exhibit puts it, “Her interest in creating portraits of Black people stems, in part, from a childhood fascination with family snapshots and albums, which she studied to learn about relatives she had never met. In her view, photography offered Black Americans their first opportunity to create self-narratives: ‘We could pose ourselves, and we could represent ourselves, and we could show up in these images the way that we wanted to be seen.’”

“If You Surrendered to the Air, You Could Ride It,” 2019.
© Amy Sherald, courtesy of Whitney Museum of American Art

Her depictions are simultaneously straightforward and mesmerizing. A few are outright political. One painting plays off the famous photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt of a US Navy sailor kissing a gal in Times Square on VJ Day; instead two men replicate this intimate embrace. But most of her offerings are representations of Black people in common settings essentially saying, “I am as real as you are.”

At a moment when Trump is mounting a cultural battle that aims to discredit and defund art and history that dares to examine race in America, the Whitney show feels rebellious. The exhibit, which runs through August 10, is scheduled to move to the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in September. I hope that happens.

“What's precious inside of him does not care to be known
by the mind in ways that diminish its presence (All American),” 2017.
© Amy Sherald. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
Photograph by Joseph Hyde