President Donald Trump's second term is defined chiefly by his hunger for revenge, and that obsession is now on a foreboding collision course with his greatest strategic failure.
Trump's vengeance-driven governing style back to his first hours in office, when he stripped security protection from officials he viewed as disloyal, including Gen. Mark Milley, John Bolton, Mike Pompeo and Mark Esper, and New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie argued that impulse has since expanded to target ordinary private citizens who defy him.
"The Ahab-like tenacity of the White House in its pursuit of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia might make sense if he were some criminal mastermind — a danger to the public order," Bouie wrote. "He wasn’t. He was just an ordinary person, a working member of his community who happened to be an easy target for the president’s deportation machine."
Abrego Garcia was deported and imprisoned despite a unanimous Supreme Court order for his return, and then later indicted on criminal charges once he successfully fought his removal, although a judge dismissed those charges in May. The Justice Department is now asking an appeals court to reinstate them.
"Trump has, for most of the summer, been pursuing a vendetta against David Hearn, a former Olympic canoeist," Bouie wrote. "Hearn was accused of vandalizing the Reflecting Pool at the Lincoln Memorial, which is in a state of disrepair in the wake of the president’s attempted renovations."
The Justice Department eventually acknowledged the damage stemmed from a "flawed installation," and U.S. attorney Jeanine Pirro infuriated the 80-year-old president by dropping that case.
"Trump is hardly the first powerful person to abuse the law enforcement powers of the federal government to pursue narrow interests and petty grievances," Bouie wrote.
Richard Nixon infamously turned the FBI and IRS against his own enemies, and J. Edgar Hoover, abused his authority as FBI director to hound the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., but he said Trump's doesn't even pretend his actions are in the nation interest.
"Trump does no such thing," the columnist wrote. "He does not see himself as a man in possession of an office, heading a government, so much as he sees himself asthe government. The state is an extension of his person. He is the king, and it is one of his two bodies."
That's why his ongoing failure to end the Iran war he started poses such an ominous threat, Bouie argued, as the president tries to "shed the stench of defeat."
The conflict has been a military failure and strategic mistake with no clear endpoint, Bouie wrote, and the ongoing negotiations and missile strikes are simply an effort to avoid the appearance of defeat rather than a genuine path to peace – and he warned that Trump would become desperate and dangerous once he realized he cannot win the war.
"What if Trump is truly stuck, fully caught in a trap of his own making?" Bouie asked
"With the terrible power of the United States at his fingertips, it is frightening to contemplate what he might do to save his fragile sense of self," he concluded. "He has already tried to wreck the country in pursuit of revenge against all those who challenge his ego and authority. There’s no reason to think that he won’t try to wreck the world in pursuit of the same."