And the law would lock him up for everybody’s safety.
Jul 20, 2026
Imagine you’re sitting in a bar or restaurant, and another customer starts howling about avenging himself on a fellow citizen, vowing violence and branding the man scum who deserves to be destroyed.
You’d call the cops, right?
And yet we’ve grown so accustomed to Trump’s vindictive tirades that we shrug them off as MAGA politics as usual, dismissing as normal what would look like sociopathic behavior in anyone else at the next table.
I’ve spent a career in government and journalism observing powerful men nurse grudges. Nixon nursed his in private. He kept an enemies list, sicced the IRS on people who crossed him, and personally orchestrated the cover-up once the Watergate break-in surfaced.
But he did it in the dark, through cutouts and deniability, because he understood something Trump has apparently never learned: a public display of vengeance tells the world more about the avenger’s character than about the person he’s avenging himself on.
Every kindergarten teacher knows this. The kid who slugs a classmate over a stolen toy gets sat in the corner, not celebrated. Civilized people learn early that naked spite earns scorn, not admiration.
Trump missed that lesson somewhere. I suspect his father set the tone. Here was a man who spent his career as an outsider in a polished, exclusionary Manhattan real-estate world. He redlined his own buildings to keep out Black tenants, then fought off the ensuing lawsuits with the same defiance he’d shown in causing them. There wasn’t much room for charity in that house.
And when young Donald came of age, Roy Cohn finished the job. His cardinal rule: never apologize, because an apology is an admission, and admissions are for suckers; retaliate instantly, instinctively, and in public if it serves you.
Trump absorbed this lesson so completely that he’s built an entire governing style, and a rally circuit, around it.
The record, viewed up close rather than at journalism’s usual arm’s length, is ugly enough to turn your stomach.
Trump has told his supporters flatly, “I am your retribution.” He’s promised to “root out” the “vermin” who live within our borders. He’s said undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” Historians immediately recognized this as an echo of Hitler’s own writing about racial purity, whether or not Trump knew where he’d picked it up.
He still won’t concede he lost in 2020, and that refusal has curdled from a quasi-legal argument into something closer to a personal vendetta against everyone he believes conspired to cheat him, including election officials, judges, and his own former aides who told the truth under oath.
His war on Iran is being sold less as strategy than as punishment for Tehran’s refusal to bow to his demands. And his use of the presidency to enrich himself and his family carries the same punitive edge. He dares anyone to question him and promises to make them regret it if they do.
I used to think this was calculated theater, red meat tossed to the base to keep them riled up. I don’t think that anymore.
This is Trump’s actual emotional operating system, and he’s teaching his followers to run on the same one because it’s coming from his own gut, not from the Heritage Foundation (though he got some inspiration there) or from any political consultant’s playbook.
Here’s what should unsettle you on the plainest, most common-sense level: none of this would be tolerable from your next-door neighbor.
If the man across the fence started talking about rooting out human vermin, poisoning bloodlines, and getting even with everyone who ever wronged him, you wouldn’t invite him to dinner. You’d worry about him, and maybe about yourself. We don’t get to suspend that judgment just because the man doing the talking happens to hold the nuclear codes.
Journalism has a bad habit of laundering this kind of thing into “rhetoric” and “messaging,” which lets readers keep their distance from what they’re actually looking at. I’m removing that distance here. I want you to sit with these words the way you’d sit with them if a familiar face, a neighbor, a longtime acquaintance, said them to you, because that’s exactly the way Trump is delivering them or wants you to hear them.
He is daring the press and the public to normalize what he’s saying, to treat it as just another campaign flourish, instead of what it plainly is: political malpractice shading into sociopathy, conducted in full view of the cameras.
If Democrats take the House this November, I hope they don’t stop at hearings. I hope they turn congressional inquiry into a genuine inquisition, the kind that could lead to impeachment. The framers wrote the impeachment clause for good reason. They knew human nature.
Nearly two centuries later, Congress added the 25th Amendment, which lets the Cabinet conduct its own inquiry into presidential fitness and remove a president if the evidence warrants it.
These tools weren’t designed only for treason, bribery, or physical infirmity. They were designed for a president who has succumbed to severe emotional dysfunction.
That’s what we’re dealing with here, and it’s long past time someone in Washington with the power to make a difference said so out loud.