The Right’s Politics of Revenge

The responses to the Trump verdict offer an instructive – and alarming – reminder of what defines the American Right today: They are out for bloody retaliation, all dressed up as patriotism

Trump at a campaign event in Arizona on June 6, 2024 - credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

It’s been a little over two weeks since Donald Trump’s felony conviction. In response, the Right has been calling for revenge. Republican elected officials, reactionary intellectuals, and rightwing activists demand retaliation – against the system, the Democrats, the Libs, the Left… against the array of “Un-American” forces they define as the enemy within.

On the least extreme end of the Republican spectrum, Senator Susan Collins, always a reminder of what counts as “moderate” in today’s GOP, still openly declared we were looking at a purely political prosecution and conviction of the Right’s Dear Leader. Her colleague Marco Rubio, another Republican politician who, not that long ago, was presented in mainstream media as an entirely reasonable conservative, posted on ex-Twitter that President Biden was “a demented man propped up by wicked & deranged people willing to destroy our country to remain in power” and it was now “time to fight fire with fire” (he didn’t actually write “fire” – he used flame emojis). A group of Republican senators released a statement declaring that because “The White House has made a mockery of the rule of law and fundamentally altered our politics in un-American ways,” they would henceforth boycott cooperation with the administration. Never mind that the White House had nothing to do with Trump’s Manhattan trial, or that these Republicans haven’t exactly been paragons of bipartisanship anyway.  As Senator Mike Lee put it: “Those who turned our judicial system into a political cudgel must be held accountable.”

In the House, Representative Dan Bishop from North Carolina, who is currently running for attorney general in his state, said the justice system was rigged against Trump just like it was against Black people in the Jim Crow south: “It’s as bad as it was in Alabama in 1950, where if you’re – if a person happened to be Black, in order to get justice. And that’s what they did in New York.” Representative Ronny Jackson from Texas proclaimed: “I am going to encourage all of my colleagues and everybody that I have any influence over as a member of Congress to aggressively go after the president and his entire family, his entire crime family, for all of the misdeeds that are out there right now related to this family.” Speaker Mike Johnson spoke of a “shameful day in American history” and called on his buddies on the Supreme Court to “step in” and protect Trump.

Beyond Congress, the Right has been up in arms. John C. Yoo, a law professor at Berkeley and also the guy who authored the torture memos under George W. Bush, felt compelled to offer his very serious legal opinion yet again. In an essay for National Review, he declared: “In order to prevent the case against Trump from assuming a permanent place in the American political system, Republicans will have to bring charges against Democratic officers, even presidents.” It was time for revenge, Yoo explained, because the evil Democrats had started it: “Only retaliation in kind can produce the deterrence necessary to enforce a political version of mutual assured destruction; without the threat of prosecution of their own leaders, Democrats will continue to charge future Republican presidents without restraint.”

The idea of mobilizing the justice system for revenge against the enemy has been fully endorsed by leading operatives of MAGA world. Stephen Miller, convinced that “Every facet of Republican Party politics and power has to be used right now to go toe-to-toe with Marxism and beat these Communists,” wanted to know: “Is every House committee controlled by Republicans using its subpoena power in every way it needs to right now?” and “Is every Republican D.A. starting every investigation they need to right now?”

The rightwing media machine erupted as soon as the verdict came down. Both Matt Walsh of The Daily Wire and Sean Davis of The Federalist demanded lists of Democratic officials to be thrown in jail immediately upon Trump returning to the White House. And on Fox News, Jesse Waters promised: “We’re going to vanquish the evil forces that are destroying this republic.” The MAGA extremist wing of rightwing activists, meanwhile, has been clamoring for the death penalty for all these “Un-American” traitors responsible for Trump’s conviction. And the base is threatening violence, trying to get to the jurors who delivered the guilty verdict.

May 30 was a dark day in the history of the Republic, if the Right is to be believed. The Heritage Foundation, the most powerful and influential of rightwing think tanks, currently spearheading the planning efforts for a more ruthless Trumpian regime known as “Project 2025,” flew the American flag upside down. This has long been a signal of acute distress – and since 2020, as Mrs. Alito has reminded us so forcefully, it has been the symbol of election deniers and insurrectionists.

“Bloodying up some noses”

Among all these reactions, one that stood out to me was a short opinion piece by Josh Hammer in Newsweek, titled “Post-Trump Verdict, Will the American Right Finally Wake Up?” – not because it argued anything new or surprising, but because it offered a perfect distillation of how the Right sees the world and what animates their politics. It’s only about 750 words long, and I doubt it took him more than twenty minutes to write it. But it has everything you need to unpack the rightwing psyche and political project: The siege mentality that defines the Right, the permission structure that governs conservative politics, and the logic that compels them to close ranks behind Donald Trump.

Hammer opens by stating his credentials as a lawyer and someone who has published legal scholarship. He wants his readers to trust him – but also ignore what he dismisses as the “details” in the Trump case, as he rages against the “sham prosecution,” a “show trial” orchestrated by a “George Soros-backed lawman,” all part of an “unprecedented lawfare tactics sullying the 2024 presidential race.” The verdict, Hammer says, constitutes the culmination of an evil campaign against Trump, orchestrated by leftist enemies within and without since 2016. It is therefore high time for “American patriots” to realize this is all “third-world, tinpot dictatorship, banana republic-type stuff” – and rise up in response to defend their country. Hammer does not hold back: Saving America, he says, is going to “take bloodying up some nose.” Time for revenge: “We must make these miscreants pay for what they have done.”

Josh Hammer, it is probably fair to say, is one of the most successful rightwing activists in the country. He has successfully turned Newsweek, where he currently is senior editor-at-large, into his mouthpiece. Newsweek was founded in 1933 and has traditionally been regarded centrist or even liberal-leaning among the major magazines. When pre-eminent fascism scholar Robert O. Paxton weighed in after the January 6 insurrection to declare Trumpism a form of fascism, for instance, he did so in a Newsweek opinion piece.

But Hammer has managed to pull the whole magazine to the right – or at least played a key role in that process. Still only in his mid-30s, he has the CV of a true conservative warrior. When he was at law school, he was an active Federalist Society member. Later, he became a fellow at the Claremont Institute, the center of the most aggressively pro-Trumpian strand of the rightwing intellectual sphere. As a lawyer and in his more scholarly work, he has promoted rightwing legal theories. He has, for instance, advocated for combining originalism with the even more extreme, more aggressive idea of “common good constitutionalism.” Formulated by Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule, “common good constitutionalism” is basically integralism – the idea that Catholic faith needs to be the basis of law, politics, and social life – put into constitutional theory form; in practice, people like Vermeule demand that society and the public square be shaped (by coercive means, if necessary!) in accordance with their reactionary strand of Catholicism.

As a rightwing activist, Hammer has worked for The Daily Wire and The Blaze; he also hosts several podcasts, because constant repetition and being loud on all channels is something that rightwingers understand has tremendous effect. Hammer finally started as an opinion editor at Newsweek in 2020, where he has made sure to inject the, uhm, perspective of rightwing extremists. In March 2022, for instance, they published an opinion piece titled “Trump was right about everything,” authored by none other than Donald Trump Jr.

Hammer is also close with the radical flank of the Republican party. He loves to brag about how he’s been hanging out with people like Blake Masters, who stood out even among the cast of extremists who the GOP nominated for office in the 2022 midterm elections for how openly he embraced political violence, and Florida governor Ron DeSantis. In general, Hammer is very much on good terms with the rightwing agitator fringes.

What is interesting about Hammer, therefore, is how he blends all the different strands of the rightwing assault on pluralistic democracy: The conservative legal movement, the media activism and agitation, the GOP as the political arm, the rightwing intellectual sphere. And his opinion piece captures precisely the position and sensibility that have integrated these different strands and factions

Alternate reality

Four things are remarkable about Hammer’s piece. First of all, his description of the past eight years as one big conspiracy, orchestrated by the evil Democrats and the nefarious Deep State, against poor Donald Trump is entirely untethered from empirical reality. In Hammer’s tale, we went from the “Russia collusion hoax” and “illegitimate spying on Trump campaign hands” to “Democrats’ street hooligans, from the Women’s March of 2017 through the Antifa-Black Lives Matter riots of 2020” to “two bogus impeachments,” the second one for what he dismisses as “the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol jamboree.” Describing the people who joined the Women’s March to protest the day after Trump’s inauguration as Democratic “street hooligans” may sound funny – until you remember that the argument here is that *any* form of protest against the regime is fundamentally illegitimate and should be treated as violent unrest, which is an indication of how these people would react to future protests in case Trump were to win the November election. It’s a disaster that this kind of bizarro parallel universe nonsense is platformed by Newsweek. The type of alternate reality we are being presented here is not supposed to convince anyone – it is an ideological statement of how Hammer thinks the past *ought to be* remembered, and it is intended to confirm the conspiratorial rage of those whose perspective on the world is entirely shaped by the rightwing propaganda machine. The people who listen to Josh Hammer will not be convinced by recognizable facts and won’t move away from Trump because of felony convictions. After all, he is *their* felon.

Siege mentality

Secondly, Hammer tells a tale of decline – the Trump verdict, in this narrative, is indicative of the “fallen state of the nation” that is under siege from radically “Un-American” forces. Hammer reaches for analogies to express how outlandish these events supposedly are. Not only is this whole proceeding “third-world, tinpot dictatorship, banana republic-type stuff” – a remarkable inversion of the “What would you say if you saw it in another country?” dictum that Liberals have often deployed against assumptions of American exceptionalism in the face of Trumpian outrageousness. Hammer also goes back in time: “it almost has the whiff of a medieval setting – a king deposes his archrival and then condemns the vanquished foe to rot in the Tower of London.” He is desperate for “American patriots of all political stripes” to “finally wake up” in order to save “this once-great nation.”

Appealing to “patriots of all political stripes,” in a piece that is so aggressively and militantly partisan, is actually revealing. The Right wants to portray the struggle between Republicans and Democrats, Left and Right, as not merely a competition between political opponents – but as an existential conflict over whether or not the only version of the country they are willing to accept as “America” will survive and endure. Rightwingers have decided that they *are* the country. The choice, therefore, isn’t partisanship or loyalty to the country. To them, the partisan divide maps perfectly onto the struggle between patriots and “Un-American” radicals for the survival of the nation. In that sense, choosing Trump *is* choosing the country.

The Permission structure that governs conservative politics

In another remarkable inversion, Hammer portrays the Right as the guardians of a liberal vision of equality before the law and a neutral justice system. “Many conservatives and Republicans like to wax nostalgic about blindfolded Lady Justice,” he says, “about neutral enforcement of the law, and about general norms of liberal neutrality.” So committed has the Right supposedly been to these ideals that they have, naively and for too long, attempted “to seize an unsustainable faux-moral high ground.” But it was all a lie, Hammer declares, a lie perpetrated by a ruthless Left that used it to steamroll its opponent.

To anyone following American politics even at a rudimentary level, this must read as bizarre theater. The Right has for quite some time showed nothing but contempt for liberal norms and precedents, the liberal state, and neutral institutions. They mock the idea that politics is anything but a fight between “Us” and “Them.” But they also do not want to be seen or regard themselves as the aggressor. If “We” leave noble principles behind and embrace a violent struggle for supremacy, Hammer maintains, then it’s solely because the Left made “Us” do it: “That is unfortunate for those Americans who actually do value and cherish neutral enforcement of the rule of law. But yet again, here we are.” In what Hammer characterizes as “this late hour of the American republic,” the Right – comprising all American patriots! – is faced with the choice of either accepting the complete destruction of the nation, or “respond to the Left as it has acted toward us: by wielding political and prosecutorial power to reward friends and punish enemies – to reward our side’s forces of civilizational sanity and punish their side’s forces of civilizational arson – within the broad confines of the rule of law.” It doesn’t get more fundamental than that: The “forces of civilizational sanity” in a desperate war against the “forces of civilizational arson.” It’s safe to assume that “within the broad confines of the rule of law” doesn’t amount to much of a restraint. If those are the stakes, an aggressive embrace of a politics of revenge and punishment for the Right’s enemies becomes not only justified, but desperately necessary.

This is precisely the permission structure that has governed conservative politics for quite some time. “Real Americans” are constantly being victimized, made to suffer under the yoke of crazy leftist politics, besieged by “Un-American” forces of leftism who have managed to take over the institutions of American life; “We” have to fight back, by whatever means, and nothing short of a counter-revolution to take America back will do. Building up this supposedly totalitarian, violent threat from a “Left” that values nothing but victory over their enemy allows the Right to justify their actions within the long-established framework of conservative self-victimization. It allowed them to support Donald Trump in the first place.

Let’s not confuse this self-serving narrative with actual analysis. The idea that Trump’s conviction in a court of law “makes” conservatives unite behind Trump, that it “forces” them to vote for him in November, merely perpetuates the rightwing permission structure. It locates all agency with liberal America – an apologist tale in which people on the Right are ultimately blameless regardless of the political choices they make and the outcomes they cause. It is simply not plausible that people who were on Team Democracy and Rule of Law until May 29 would suddenly turn to Donald Trump as their champion because of a verdict delivered by a jury of ordinary Americans. In a vacuum, it may sound reasonable to suggest that this could be the event that causes conservatives to lose trust in the institutions. But in the real world, the Right has been lusting to use the criminal justice system to go after their enemies since long before the Trump trials. It’s not only Trump himself who openly promises to make the Department of Justice a tool for revenge, it’s also a core element of the “Project 2025” planning efforts.  

Trump embodies the promise of revenge

There are many reasons why conservatives stick with Trump. One key dynamic surely is that those who are still on Team Trump (or committed to being anti-anti-Trump) in the spring of 2024 have invested so much in terms of justifying their actions to themselves and to the world, and have thereby enabled such outlandish behavior, that it might be hard, even purely from a psychological standpoint, to imagine getting out now. At the very least, it would necessitate a whole lot of critical introspection: If you leave now, was it all for nothing? All the times you had to debase and embarrass yourself in public? And the people who you have painted as the radically “Un-American” enemy, those whose witch hunt you have decried for years: Are you ultimately going to let them win?

But there is also an affirmative case for Trump that people on the Right have been making since he came down the golden elevator. If “real America” is under siege, and its defenders have their backs against the wall in an all-out, Us vs Them struggle for the survival of the nation that defines and consumes all politics, then Trump, so the argument goes, is precisely the right leader.

The clearest articulation of this idea can be found in the infamous “Flight 93 Election” essay that far-right intellectual Michael Anton, a fixture in the Claremont Institute orbit, published shortly before the 2016 election in the Claremont Review of Books. Anton made the case for Donald Trump by presenting the Democrats as a fundamental threat to America, akin to the terrorists of 9/11. He called on the Right to embrace Trumpism because Trump would be willing to go much further to stop this “Un-American” threat than any of the “ordinary” Republicans who were “merely reactive,” who “would have ensured more of the same,” and for whom Anton had nothing but contempt. Since Trump, in this interpretation, wasn’t bound by norms, traditions, or precedents, he could be counted on to do whatever was necessary to fight back against the “wholesale cultural and political change” – to “charge the cockpit,” in Anton’s crude analogy, like the passengers of Flight 93. In Anton’s words: “Trump, alone among candidates for high office in this or in the last seven (at least) cycles, has stood up to say: I want to live. I want my party to live. I want my country to live. I want my people to live.” In many ways, the “Flight 93” mentality has completely taken over the Right – it is now all “Flight 93” politics, all the time.

In this interpretation, Trump’s vulgarity, his crassness, the lack of decorum and decency, is exactly what qualifies him to fight a supposedly insidious opponent. Conservatives felt like they needed someone who would be willing to get his hands dirty – a brawler, a bruiser.  As conservative Christian author Stephen Mansfield put it in October 2017: “Why So Many Conservative Christians Wanted a ‘Pagan Brawler’ in the White House.” During the Kavanaugh hearings in 2018, the idea that only Trump the brawler could be counted on to hold the line against the liberal onslaught was particularly prominent among conservatives. “A rude, foul-mouthed fighter like Donald Trump” was all that stood between conservative America and liberal domination, rightwing columnist Michael Graham declared in the Boston Herald: “when you turn politics into the WWE,” (who did that? The Democrats! For having the audacity to question the nomination of a man credibly accused of sexual assault!) “can you be surprised when voters want the ‘Manhattan Mauler’ on their side?”

It has become quite fashionable among conservative politicians and activists to present themselves as Trump-like “I’m ready to get dirty!” fighters – a bunch of self-styled brawlers in what they perceive and/or pretend to be a struggle of good vs. evil. Christopher Rufo, for instance, has proudly adopted the label of a brawler. Yet almost all of them pale in comparison to Trump. He doesn’t just sympathize with the (mostly white, mostly male) grievance and anger that defines the rightwing base, the desire for revenge – but shares it, revels in it, is consumed by it himself. It forms the core promise of Trumpism as a form of radical politics.  

The radicals are in charge

The modern Right is best approached as a coalition of forces, ideas, and people who struggle over how to respond to what they see as the existential threat of multiracial democracy – with the most extreme voices always trying to pull the coalition towards a more radical politics. The eternal complaint of the rightwing radicals is that the conservative establishment, the “normal” Republicans, aren’t getting the job done, that a different breed of fighter for “real America” is needed to save the nation. As the idea that it is no longer enough to be conservative has become a rallying cry on the Right, as it has become fashionable to openly renounce label conservatism even among people close to the power centers of conservatism, it is clear that those who demand what they call a “counter-revolution” are now firmly in charge. The extremists, those who perceive the world entirely through the lens of a politics of revenge, are thoroughly in control of defining the problem, the agenda, the style of politics, and the political identity on the Right. And they long to get bloody.