Donald Trump's Extensive List of Second-Term Revenge Targets | Vanity Fair

17 November 2024 2853
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Something you may have picked up on in the last eight years or so is that Donald Trump is obsessed with revenge against the people, places, and things he believes have wronged him. During his first run for office, for example, he spent ample amounts of time musing about imprisoning Hillary Clinton, and in his most recent run for the White House, he vowed, on several occasions, to crush the “enemy within.”

While targets of Trump’s ire may have been able to spend the last several months soothing themselves with the notion that it would be inconceivable for voters to reelect a man who is vocal about his plans for going after fellow Americans, that’s obviously not the way things shook out last week. Instead, Trump cruised to a second term in office. And now, it’s not a question of if the incoming president will make good on his threats for revenge, but when and against whom. “Will Trump retaliate?” Gwenda Blair, who wrote a biography about the Trump family, asked The New York Times. “Of course. The only question is how much will be broad-brush and how much will be targeted.” Which makes the reported fears of the people in Trump’s crosshairs extremely understandable!

Who, exactly, would be within their rights to be sweating buckets—or, more likely, shitting bricks—at the very real possibility of Trump and/or his government allies coming after them? The long list includes:

“He’s erratic and has the attention span of a seven-year-old,” Harry Litman, a former Clinton DOJ official, told the Times of Trump. “But his thirst for revenge against those he views as his current antagonists is very real, and there’s no reason to think he would be deterred by legal niceties.” (Trump’s office did not respond to the Times’ request for comment concerning whether he would make good on campaign revenge threats.)

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