Журналист предупреждает: жажда мести Дональда Трампа угрожает демократии и миру

We’ve never seen anyone whose appetite for revenge is as great as Donald Trump’s. Vindictiveness seems to be one of the most powerful motivations in him. People who were simply performing their professional duties have been fired. Trump has used his supporters to destroy the political careers of Republican office holders who disagreed with him, or stood up to him. He has brought bogus prosecutions to punish people who have opposed him. Trump has had his Justice Department prosecute James Comey, one of America’s straightest of straight arrows—revenge on the man who wouldn’t betray his legal duties to serve the President. And when Mike Pence refused to betray his constitutional duties on January 6, Trump was willing to let the fury of a crowd chanting “Hang Mike Pence” be directed against his own Vice President. And Trump hasn’t merely practiced revenge. He has preached it. Jesus taught that if someone strikes you on one cheek, turn the other. Trump has explicitly preached the opposite: if somebody hits you, hit back ten times harder. Why is biblical morality so hostile to revenge? Perhaps because revenge perpetuates the very Brokenness that morality seeks to overcome. The Lord says, “Vengeance is mine.” Jesus says, in effect, don’t send the blow back. Because when I have been injured and avenge myself by injuring you, now  you  have been injured. If you follow the same ethic, you strike back at me. Every act of vengeance creates the grievance that calls forth the next one. That’s how the Hatfields and McCoys keep feuding. It’s why Gandhi said that if we live by “an eye for an eye,” eventually the whole world will be blind. But then Trump said something during his 2024 campaign that raises an even larger question. “I am your retribution!” YOUR retribution. If Trump was correctly judging the emotional desires of the people whose votes he was seeking, millions of Americans harbor a desire for revenge. And you don’t want revenge unless you feel that someone has wronged you. Why would so many Americans feel WRONGED? There may be good reasons. For a generation after World War II, ordinary working Americans could expect rising wages and upward mobility into a secure middle-class life. But beginning around 1973, productivity continued to rise while the wages of typical workers largely stopped keeping pace. Wealth increasingly flowed upward, inequality widened, and the United States went from being a leader among affluent societies in upward mobility to lagging behind a number of other democracies. So there may be a real basis for the feeling that  the system screwed us —that people were denied the rising prosperity and opportunity they had been led to expect. But who gets blamed for giving them the short end of the stick is another matter. Grievance can be manipulated. The forces most responsible for directing an ever-larger share of America’s wealth to the top are much more closely allied with the leader promising to be their Retribution than with many of the people against whom he directs their anger. Revenge is destructive enough when the target is the right one. Add the ease with which a real grievance can be directed toward people who did not cause the injury, and vengeance becomes an even more potent instrument for Brokenness. Trump himself clearly is not one of those Americans for whom the economic deck was stacked. Born into great wealth and privilege, he started life somewhere around second or third base. Whatever accounts for his extraordinary need for revenge comes from somewhere else. But whatever its source, the magnitude of that need should itself be a warning. Revenge is about conflict, not cooperation. It is about punishing enemies, not looking at people on the other side as people with whom one might work to accomplish purposes that would be good for everyone. And that pattern extends well beyond Revenge. Wherever we look, Trump is using his power to increase the world’s Brokenness: **  Where the choice is between the invading aggressor and the innocent victim of invasion, he sides with the Russian dictator; ** Where the choice is between accelerating the development of clean energy and continuing to destabilize the Earth’s climate, he denies the climate crisis and boosts the fossil-fuel industry; ** Where the choice is between strengthening our long-standing alliances and antagonizing friends like Canada, Denmark, and South Korea, he acts to turn our allies against us; ** Where the choice is between bringing Americans together to pursue common purposes and fomenting division, he acts as the nation’s Divider-in-Chief; ** Where the choice is between preserving America’s inheritance of democratic norms, the rule of law, and the Constitution, and tearing down those pillars of good order, he works to tear them down. Which brings us back to where we began: Donald Trump has an extraordinary appetite for revenge. We should see that extraordinary vindictiveness not merely as an unpleasant personality trait, but as a warning. Revenge arises out of Brokenness and sends more Brokenness back into the world. Vindictiveness is a symptom of a more pervasive disease. An appetite for revenge as extraordinary as Trump’s should tell us: this is not someone to whom we should entrust power. And a nation where a hankering for vengeance is so widespread needs to ask itself: What is happening to our people that makes them feel so wronged?