One of the most striking things I have learned, since the beginning of the second Trump presidency, appeared in a March 2025 online story in The Atlantic, by the writer Peter Wehner. Mr. Wehner worked in the administrations of three Republican Presidents: Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush.
His March piece in The Atlantic was titled: "Trump’s Appetite for Revenge Is Insatiable."
Mr. Wehner wrote, in his piece, that Trump's desire for vengeance is nothing new--that it goes back decades:
Revenge has long been a central theme for Donald Trump. In a 1992 interview with the journalist Charlie Rose, Trump was asked if he had regrets. Among them, he told Rose, “I would have wiped the floor with the guys who weren’t loyal, which I will now do. I love getting even with people.” When Rose interjected, “Slow up. You love getting even with people?” Trump replied, “Absolutely.”
Here is the video of the interview with Charlie Rose. The above comments appear at approximately 41 minutes from the video's start.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QQqioef19k
Here, too, is the link to Mr. Wehner's piece in the March 20, 2025 Atlantic:
As Mr. Wehner noted, at the outset of his Atlantic piece, Trump famously said the following, during his last campaign for the presidency: "For those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution."
While on the first day of his second presidency, in 2025, Trump set free all of those convicted of, or charged with, crimes related to the events of January 6, 2021, including those convicted of assaulting law enforcement officers on that day--some 140 officers were injured at the Capitol on January 6th--his primary interest, regarding retribution, clearly concerns himself.
And now, there has been the indictment of former FBI Director James Comey.
As The Washington Post reported on Thursday:
The case against Comey marks the most significant step to date in Trump’s campaign to deploy the Justice Department to avenge personal grievances and prosecute those he perceives as his enemies. The president’s demands during the weekend that Attorney General Pam Bondi swiftly charge Comey and others flew in the face of long-standing norms meant to shield the Justice Department from direct political interference from the White House.
Last week, the White House forced out the previous top prosecutor on the case after he declined to seek an indictment and replaced him with one of Trump’s former personal attorneys.
That successor, Lindsey Halligan — now interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia — personally presented the case against Comey to the grand jury on Thursday, said two people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. Before she was sworn in Monday, Halligan had no prosecutorial experience.
Trump claimed today that the indictment of Mr. Comey was "about justice, really. It's not revenge."
Yet, as The Washington Post story on Thursday noted, attorneys for Comey are "likely to point to the fact that before Thursday’s indictment the case had been rejected by Erik S. Siebert, the Trump-appointed interim U.S. attorney who had been overseeing the investigation. He concluded there was insufficient evidence to move forward with a prosecution, The Post has reported."
The Post story continued:
Siebert resigned last week under intense pressure from the Trump administration, in part because of that decision. Trump appointed Halligan as his replacement because, the president said, she would “get things moving.”
Since Halligan was sworn in Monday, several attorneys in the Eastern District of Virginia shared a memo with her laying out concerns with the strength of the evidence, two people familiar with that meeting said. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak freely about those internal deliberations. Nevertheless, Halligan opted to move forward.
