The Orange Devil

Trump's Revenge Plan Is Real

Donald Trump’s recent obsession with revenge deserves more attention, coverage, and action.

It’s real. It’s coming. It’s a singular threat to the future of this nation.

It will land me, and people like me, in jail or worse for the unforgivable sin of opposing Donald Trump. It's not an abstraction or an exaggeration. It’s a pendant reality if he’s re-elected, and even with over 50 articles about it in the last weeks, we’re still not taking it seriously as a nation.

In the wee hours of last night, I was sleepless and reread Thomas Middleton’s The Revengers Tragedy, a Jacobean revenge play I’d last opened decades ago. It struck me that the Jacobean playwrights would have understood Trump’s craving for revenge more than we do today: all his bloody, obsessive, and impulsive promises are real and will be a stain we can’t wash out.

In The Revengers Tragedy, the Duke’s younger son commits rape, and the old Duke, despairing, says:

Duchess, it is your youngest son; we're sorry.
His violent act has e'en drawn blood of honour
And stain'd our honours,
Thrown ink upon the forehead of our state,
Which envious spirits will dip their pens into
After our death and blot us in our tombs,
For that which would seem treason in our lives
Is laughter when we're dead: who dares now whisper
That dares not then speak out, and e'en proclaim,
With loud words and broad pens our closest shame?

Like much of Jacobean drama and tragedy, Middleton’s cast of depraved royals are all dark and flawed — the Duke’s sins are as vivid as his son’s — and even the (anti) hero of the piece is obsessed with revenge, a murderer, a liar, and a fraud who dies in the end. The play itself is a moral tale quite against the concept of elaborate vengeance, as the vast majority of revenge dramas were. From Seneca to Shakespeare, revenge ends as badly for those taking it as those on its receiving end.

Revenge tragedies were there to teach a moral lesson about human nature and the failure of revenge. Donald Trump has never read a play of any kind in his entire life. He has no moral framework on which a revenge tragedy, old or new, could apply its lessons.

Which brings us to a play I call The Orange Devil.

Oh, it’s not one of the Jacobean plays I love so well, but it does play off of John Webster’s The White Devil, which is one of the classics of the genre and, while set in Italy, was quite openly a satire of James I’s reign in England at the time.

When the Orange Devil repeatedly promises revenge on his real and imagined antagonists, the temptation will be to laugh it off, to fall victim to the old “Take Trump literally, but not seriously” trope that lets the media and his more educated followers pretend his promises are merely verbal tics and campaign spectacle.

They are not, and I can assure you of that from personal experience. Many of my Republican and former-Republican Never Trump colleagues have lived the same story, even those — perhaps particularly those — who worked for Trump in the past. Trump is a human grudge, a font of endless, bitter recrimination, and anyone who has crossed his hawse knows it.

These promises of revenge in a second Trump term are now so wildly outside American political tradition that it’s time to pay attention to what they mean and why they’re more dangerous than the 2016 promises of “Lock her up.”

In our lifetimes, three Presidents have embraced revenge as a political tool, but none like Trump. Lyndon Johnson did like to hold his enemies to political account. He was ruthless, aggressive, and mindful to cause his opponents political discomfort. Richard Nixon loved his enemies list and stretched the law to the breaking point to punish his opponents, eventually being driven from office because of it.

No one rivals what Trump did from 2016 to 2021, and no candidate has ever run on a platform of revenge and retribution until now. Neither man rounded up his political rivals and critics for revenge and punishment.

His allies are trying — sometimes desperately — to get Trump to nod and wink at the camera as if the revenge talk is just that…talk. When Dr. Phil’s controversial interview aired, Trump was given every chance to walk back the revenge rhetoric, and he declined, saying, “Well, revenge does take time, I will say that, and sometimes revenge can be justified, Phil, I have to be honest. Sometimes it can.”

Trump doesn’t want the off-ramp or the rhetorical caveat. He wants his mob to internalize his desire for revenge, and he won’t let even well-meaning interlocutors stand in his way.

Of course, the Republican Party is all-in.

Here’s the warning again. Three meaningful factors bounded the abuse of executive power in the first Amdinstation. First, Trump is dumb. He’s cunning and feral, but he could not grasp the scope of the depth of executive power until well into 2019. Second, in early 2020, COVID threw off the best-laid plans of his more authoritarian staffers.

Finally, no grownups will be in the room for the second term. There will be no John Kelly, Jim Mattis, or Rex Tillerson. Jared and Ivanka’s moderating power in the first term is no longer welcome.

Revenge is coming.

Trump will be surrounded by eager sycophants, all seeking to outdo one another in executing his will. They will not care about the law, temporary injunctions from courts, the media, or Congress. They will not stop to wonder if this is destroying America; they seek that outcome. Even if Trump loses focus, this will be a machine that goes of its own accord, a spectacle, a delight for the mob and its media apparatus.

They will act and dare America to catch up. We’ll sue and scream. They’ll order arrests and roundups of dissidents.

If Republicans control the House, expect a wild ride of nightmare “investigations.” Even the gentry Republicans will contort their old conservatism and alleged respect for the rules of law to say, “Well, of course, he had to arrest Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton…”

Political opponents of Donald Trump, from Joe Biden down to, well, me, will find themselves hauled before Congress, investigated by State and Federal attorneys-general, targeted for IRS audits, and have their property and assets seized on the flimsiest pretexts.

The senior staff of the Department of Justice and FBI will be fired, investigated, and punished. The intelligence community will be purged and similarly punished. Trump will fire dozens of military officers his team identifies as pro-Ukraine. Political opponents — looking at you, Nikki Haley — will similarly be in Trump’s crosshairs.

Every prosecutor, attorney who ever brought a case against him, former staffer, and ex-ally from Mike Pence on down is on the list.

Running won’t help most. Steve Bannon last week told former FBI director Andy McCabe, “…you should be worried. You should be very worried. But also understand this, brother, we have extradition treaties with virtually every country in the world. And you go ahead and run and run as far as you want. We're going to come and get you."

My very favorite moment of this new era won’t be watching Trump use the power of the government to hammer people like me. It will be Trump shattering the protections of the First Amendment and using the power of government to shut down media outlets and prosecute reporters who offend him. (“But, Biden was so old” will be on their graves.)

His allies — Secretary of the Internet David Sacks, as one idea — will tell Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok that allowing anti-Trump content on their platforms will lead to massive and instant Federal regulatory impacts. “That’s a nice Internet company you’ve got there…be a shame if there was, you know, a tragic fire.”

My media friends are rolling their eyes about this now, thinking that even this Supreme Court wouldn’t go along with that, but the moment Trump has Stephen Miller send some ad-hoc Federal goon squad to kick down the doors at the New York Times over some vague national security pretext, get back to me.

Trump won’t simply use the power of government to exact revenge.

He’ll use his mob as he did on January 6th, 2021. I can readily and easily imagine him saying, “Well, if the Deep State doesn’t help me punish the people who are allied with the Communists, the Marxists, and the pedophiles, the American people will take it into their own hands, and if they do, I will pardon them.”

If you don’t believe there are tens of millions of Americans conditioned to act on Trump’s whims and edicts, many armed to the teeth and fed on a steady diet of agitprop that Joe Biden is a global criminal, Democrats are communists who drink the blood of children, and that a cabal of Marxists is racing to enslave them, think again.

I’ve seen these people, up close and personal, at my door and in my face. They’ve doxxed us, swatted us, and threatened to kill me and my children for nearly a decade.

If we don’t defeat him this November, he’ll feel validated and vindicated, believing this promise of revenge was what got him into power again.

There will be no better angels in The Orange Devil. There will be no sensible Republican in office who stands up and decries it. The courts and the “norms and guardrails” will not save us.

Those on “the list” know it will be a time of terror and chaos. We see what’s coming more clearly than the people who’ve empowered and enabled Trump in politics and — in too many cases — in the media.

There will be no safe place in America. The revenge plan will be sweeping and global and use every aspect of executive power.

Those of us in this fight for a decade now understand that beating him this November isn’t just for America’s survival but for our own and that of our children and grandchildren.

It’s the only thing standing between Trump and his allies and their rabid desire for revenge against America.

“Stain'd our honours” will be just the start of it.