“I am your warrior,” Donald Trump declared in a 90-minute speech at a 2023 campaign event in Waco, Texas. “I am your justice.”
Trump promised to take revenge on behalf of his supporters: “For those who have been wronged and betrayed,” he said, “I am your retribution.”
This is a campaign promise on which Trump has already delivered. Even before he returns to the White House next week, Trump has effectively conducted a purge in his own party, pushing out of office eight of the 10 Republican members of the House who voted for his 2021 impeachment, in addition to pushing into retirement many of his Senate critics: Jeff Flake of Arizona, Bob Corker of Tennessee and Mitt Romney of Utah, the only Republican senator who voted to convict Trump in both of his impeachment trials.
More than any presidential candidate in recent memory, with the possible exception of Richard Nixon, Trump has vowed to use the prosecutorial and regulatory levers of government to punish those whom he believes wronged him: by voting to discredit his presidency, indicting him and accusing him repeatedly of insurrection.
Trump’s second term is apt to become known as a kind of revenge presidency, the return of the king.
Studies of revenge show that it is addictive, both psychologically and physically.
James Kimmel Jr., a lawyer who is a lecturer in psychiatry at Yale Medical School and the author of the forthcoming book “The Science of Revenge,” wrote by email in response to my inquiries:
Revenge desires are activated by grievances — that is, real or imagined perceptions of having been wronged, betrayed, shamed, humiliated, or victimized. Grievances are intensely painful and activate the pain network inside the brain — specifically a structure called the anterior insula.
The brain is averse to pain and seeks a compensating experience of pleasure. Humans have evolved in a way that makes hurting the people who hurt us (or their proxies) highly pleasurable. It’s so pleasurable, in fact, that it releases dopamine and activates the brain’s pleasure and reward neurocircuitry of addiction.
An addiction to revenge raises serious questions, Kimmel continued:
Like drugs, the pleasurable effects of revenge gratification wear off quickly, almost always leading to more pain and suffering, and sometimes to the desire for more and greater levels of revenge.
With addiction, control signals from the brain’s prefrontal cortex — which is designed to weigh costs and benefits and stop us from making poor choices — are hijacked and reward circuitry runs amok. Addiction is as an inability to resist an urge to do something that is harmful to yourself or others.
I asked Kimmel whether he believed Trump was “addicted to revenge,” recognizing, of course, that Kimmel has not examined Trump and can make his observations based only on Trump’s public comments.
Kimmel replied:
When President Trump declared to followers who see themselves as victims that “I am your retribution,” he seemed to be telling us that he is struggling with revenge addiction. Despite the many negative consequences he has experienced, he often appears from public reporting to be unable to resist retaliating against those who he perceives have hurt him, and he seems to derive pleasure from doing this, which fits the general definition of addiction.
Kimmel added that he is making
these observations with compassion and hope, not to stigmatize or politicize. Revenge addiction is not a moral defect and has no political boundaries. It is a disorder or disease like type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, and asthma. People need help, not more punishment. The phenomenon of Donald Trump has become a national laboratory and experiment for revenge addiction.
As the incoming president, he is in a unique position. He can mobilize the federal government, the scientific and public health communities, and the private sector to research and develop prevention and treatment strategies for revenge addiction and support those who struggle with it. This could begin on Inauguration Day. He could dramatically flip the script, change the national discourse, and help millions by declaring to the American people “Now, I am your forgiveness.”
While “the human desire for revenge is universal,” Kimmel argued that “addictions generally afflict about 20 percent of a population, and that it varies by degree.” Kimmel said his research shows “that tyrants such as Hitler, Stalin, and Mao were addicted to violent revenge seeking throughout much of their lives,” but for some “revenge can be limited to the imagination, unkind words, or more socially acceptable, nonviolent acts of retaliation. President Trump’s revenge seeking to date has been nonviolent.”
Trump’s threats may be nonviolent, but he has explicitly declared his intention to bring criminal charges against members of the Biden family, those who served on the House’s Jan. 6 committee and a host of others, including Kamala Harris, Senator Adam Schiff of California, Gen. Mark Milley, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump, and John Brennan, a former director of the C.I.A.
During the 2024 campaign, friendly interviewers like Sean Hannity and the psychologist Phil McGraw (better known as Dr. Phil) tried unsuccessfully to get Trump to renounce his pursuit of revenge, but Trump pushed back.
“You have so much to do,” McGraw told Trump during an interview on Dr. Phil’s Podcast. “You don’t have time to get even. You only have time to get right.” Trump resisted:
Well, revenge does take time. I will say that. And sometimes revenge can be justified. Phil, I have to be honest. You know, sometimes it can.
When Hannity pushed Trump to back off during a Fox News interview, Trump countered: “When this election is over, based on what they’ve done, I would have every right to go after them.” Trump made it clear in both interviews that he relishes the prospect of inflicting harm on those he believes have treated him unfairly.
Anthony C. Lopez of Washington State University, Rose McDermott of Brown University and Pete Hatemi of Penn State are coauthors of “ ‘Blunt Not the Heart, Enrage It’: the Psychology of Revenge and Deterrence.” Lopez wrote by email in response to my inquiries that the pleasure derived from revenge “stems from evolutionary mechanisms where deterrence and reputation management were essential for survival, reinforcing behaviors that imposed costs on harmful individuals.”
Revenge, Lopez wrote, is not only “a human universal,” it is also unique to humans:
Not even our closest primates — chimpanzees and bonobos — ruminate for extended periods on how to return harm to specific individuals as payment for some harm delivered long ago.
This is where human revenge gets really dangerous — it’s not our willingness to retaliate that makes revenge problematic, it’s when we cannot let go of it and it spirals across time and space.
Among the problems raised by the use of political power for revenge, two stand out, according to Lopez:
It leads to two political failures: first, it undermines faith in institutions which themselves are supposed to correct wrongdoing, and second, it replaces a desire to understand the grievances of our adversaries with a desire merely to limit or harm them.
The threat posed by revenge to institutions, Lopez wrote,
is particularly true in democracies in which a pillar of the rule of law is trust in the institutions — not people — to mete out justice. Justice works when we accept the rules of the game and we place our trust in institutions over personalities.
In this context, one thing that stands out about Trump is the importance he places on his personal feelings, views and impulses, particularly when they conflict with institutions and tradition.
A taste for revenge, Lopez suggested, “is likely associated with personality traits such as dominance, competitiveness and low empathy, as these traits align with theories of predatory aggression as well as hate-based aggression.”
Lopez recommended a 2013 paper that he and others consider seminal in the study of the psychology of revenge: “Cognitive Systems for Revenge and Forgiveness” by Michael McCullough of the University of California-San Diego and two colleagues.
“Because the desire for revenge is so closely linked to violence,” McCullough and his coauthors write, “it has been fashionable in Western thought since the Stoic and, later, Christian philosophers to view revenge as immoral, irrational, or both.”
More recently, social scientists and psychologists have promoted “the idea that the desire for revenge is indicative of psychological dysfunction. Linking revenge to mental disorder seems reasonable at first glance because the desire for revenge is a common response to extreme violence and trauma.”
McCullough and his coauthors challenge this view, arguing that the more effective and illuminating approach to understanding revenge is to examine its “functional” role, by asking what it does achieve.
Using the language of evolutionary theory, they write:
Specifically, we hypothesize that cognitive mechanisms for revenge evolved because their behavioral outputs (i.e., retaliatory impositions of costs or withholdings of benefits) caused individuals to revise downward the net returns they expect to receive by engaging in exploitive behaviors against the vengeful individual in the future, which in turn (a) deters them from efforts to exploit the retaliator or (b) induces them to emit benefits for the sake of the retaliator.
Put another way, revenge and the threat of revenge are a way to get oppressors, exploiters and bullies to retreat.
“The desire for revenge,” McCullough writes in his 2008 book, “Beyond Revenge: the Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct,”
isn’t a disease to which certain unfortunate people fall prey. Instead, it’s a universal trait of human nature, crafted by natural selection, that exists today because it was adaptive in the ancestral environment in which the human species evolved.
David Chester, a professor of psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University, replied by email to my inquiry:
Revenge can be a very pleasant experience for many people, at least in the moment. Our research has repeatedly found revenge-related activity in the brain’s dopamine-rich circuits that facilitate feelings of pleasure and reward.
However, Chester went on to say,
this momentary feeling of pleasure quickly fades and in its wake is an increase in negative emotions. This brief pulse of pleasure followed by a ‘sadistic hangover’ mirrors the emotion dynamics we see in addictive behaviors and may serve to reinforce revenge-seeking over time as people try to escape their distress by reexperiencing the sweetness of revenge.
What characterizes revenge seekers?
Our research and others’ reliably shows that vengeful people often have a broad constellation of other “antagonistic” traits, such as aggressiveness, spitefulness, psychopathy, sadism, narcissism, Machiavellianism, greed, entitlement, hostility, and callousness.
The common theme among all of these traits is the tendency to pursue one’s own selfish goals at the expense of others. Vengefulness is also linked to being chronically angry. Angrily ruminating on one’s grievances provides the fuel and focus to pursue revenge. Vengeful people are also interesting in that they can be both impulsive and planful.
The result?
When you combine an antagonistic disposition with chronic anger, you get a vengeful personality. Whether those vengeful traits manifest as immediate acts of reactive aggression or more premeditated long-term pursuits of revenge depends on the presence of impulsivity or impulse control.
What are the constraints on excessive revenge seeking and are they in place now?
Formally, a defining feature of most modern societies is that vengeance is removed from the hands of the victim and given over to the state. If someone harms you, you cannot legally harm them back and instead you must appeal to the state to pursue and punish the person who hurt you. This is a remarkably universal legal standard and shows us how important it is to human civilization to curtail individuals’ pursuits of vengeance.
There are also informal sanctions against revenge. Vengeance is morally disavowed by most religions and moral systems (e.g., “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind”). Further, there’s almost no better way to be excluded from human groups than to be belligerent and aggressive. If you routinely meet slights or injuries with vicious retaliation, you will quickly find yourself socially isolated. These moral and social consequences can be powerful deterrents.
Steven Pinker, a cognitive psychologist at Harvard, argued in an email that “there’s a close relationship between revenge and dominance — bullies and badasses intimidate their targets by a threat of retaliation, not just against actual harms, but against signs of disrespect.”
The fear they instill, Pinker continued, “is partly a fear of an unprovoked attack, but also a fear or retaliation against any defiance or disrespect.”
Alan Lambert, a professor of psychology at Washington University in St. Louis, stressed in an email that revenge has complex and conflicting psychological consequences and should not be viewed in such simple terms as “revenge is sweet.”
Instead, Lambert wrote, “revenge is bittersweet: it can simultaneously trigger positive and negative emotions.”
On the positive side, Lambert contended:
People have an inherent need to believe that the world is just and punishing people for their wrongdoings can trigger positive emotions in the form of pleasure or satisfaction. However, as our and others’ work has shown, acts of revenge can, at the same time, also trigger negative emotions, such as anger.
This seems counterintuitive, until one realizes that acts of revenge can increase the salience of the original “infraction.” So, in this case, when Trump supporters are considering revenge against those perceived to have wronged them, such “revenge seeking” can lead to rumination on the initial infractions committed by their political enemies.
In other words, and more broadly: retribution against the transgressor can trigger thoughts about the misdeeds for which that person is being punished in the first place. This, in turn, can also trigger negative emotion. This is why it’s useful to think of revenge as having bittersweet consequences.
While the consequences may be bittersweet, post-revenge rumination can, in turn, create a vicious cycle.
“People think that revenge offers hedonic benefit, in the form of a cathartic-like drop in their own level of anger,” Lambert, Fade R. Eadeh and Emily J. Hanson argue in a 2019 paper “Anger and Its Consequences for Judgment and Behavior.” “But, in reality, the exact opposite is true: Revenge makes them more, not less, angry.”
People are motivated, they continue, “to see the world as just and orderly, a place in which people get what they deserve and deserve what they get.”
The motivation to restore justice, Lambert, Eadeh and Hanson write, “can involve overt acts of hostility. One important facet of such aggression is revenge.”
While Lambert and his colleagues do not cite Trump, their analysis suggests that Trump’s instinct for revenge is based on a highly personalized concept of a just and orderly world in which virtually any attack or criticism of him, from criminal indictments to voting for impeachment and then to convict him, to testifying at the House Jan. 6 Committee hearings, is a violation of the just world principle and opens up the prospect of vengeful retaliation.
In other words, the nation may be subjected to a presidency driven by a lust for revenge, implemented through the prosecutorial arms of the Justice Department, through the regulatory powers of the executive branch, and, if Trump has his way, through a politicized civil service subject to at-will dismissal.
Not only has Trump won over a major bloc of voters who share his resentments and grievances, he has — at least partially — neutered the two most important institutions empowered to set guardrails on the presidency, Congress and the Supreme Court.
It will be rough sailing for the next four years, but it won’t be forever. It is virtually impossible that Trump is going to be ruler for life — there are too many obstacles, not to mention time constraints — but as Madison foresaw in Federalist 51, “ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” both among the politicians and judges who hold the traditional checks and balances in their hands as well as among the MAGA populists and anti-government contrarians of Silicon Valley now battling for Trump’s attention.
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