Vengeance & Violence from the White House
Almost one year into his second presidency Donald Trump has oozed vengeance and violence like a deranged human being. By blaming the victim, the left-leaning film director Rob Reiner, for his own murder and using a family tragedy in Hollywood for his self-aggrandizement the president has taken his malignant narcissism to a new level. But this is only the last case in a growing list of moral transgressions which encourage the MAGA movement’s lust for cruelty with traditional conservatives barely distancing themselves. Why does he get away with unlawful acts and vile language which seemed unimaginable in a democratic environment just a few years ago? Why doesn’t Trump’s obvious derangement lead to open resistance, spontaneous demonstrations, renewed calls for impeachment or a dramatic turn in the polls. Why are his political opponents so helpless and why does the general public just play numb?
It was the murder of the well-known and beloved film director Rob Reiner and of his wife by their troubled son which showed what level of verbal violence Donald Trump is capable of and to what extent he will go to smear anybody who has criticized his politics of anger. For those who have not read Trump’s reaction on his Truth Social platform it is worth quoting his statement in full:
“A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood. Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS. He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, and with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before. May Rob and Michele rest in peace”.
It is the clear case of an obviously deranged person pathologizing his cultured but clear-spoken and now dead adversary as “deranged”. Commentators of the legacy media mostly agree: “We are led by the most loathsome human being ever to occupy the White house”, writes Bret Stephens in “The New York Times”. And David Remnick asks the readers of the “New Yorker”: “Do you know anyone quite as malevolent? At your place of work? On your campus? A colleague? A teacher? ... Have you ever in your life encountered a character as wretched as Donald Trump?
Well, you could have seen it coming. Trump’s litany of derogatory statements about women, soldiers and journalists is long. From his time as vulgar real-estate mogul in New York through his days as a political candidate onto his presidencies he has called women “horseface”, “fat pigs”, “slobs”, “disgusting animals” and most recently “piggy” when a woman journalist asked him a critical question.
Trump has called US-soldiers killed in action “losers” and “suckers. He said about the war veteran and presidential candidate John McCain who had spent five years in a North Vietnamese prison that he preferred “people that weren’t captured”. And he called journalists and media organizations whose coverage he did not like “enemies of the people”. “Things happen”, was Trump’s comment about the murder of the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi intelligence when the President recently received the Saudi ruler Mohammed Bin Salman in the White House to talk about future deals with the Kingdom led by an autocrat of his liking.
Thus, the habit of dehumanizing women, the weak and his opponents, of tolerating and even propagating violence has been visible since Donald Trump has come into the limelight of entertainment and politics. On day one of his second term, he has pardoned 1.500 insurgents who had stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2020, trying to overturn the election victory of Joe Biden. A president who is arbitrarily freeing people convicted of serious crimes, drug kingpins and corrupt businessmen erodes the moral foundation of the justice system.
The acceptance of violence as discursive and political tool has percolated into the MAGA movement and beyond. An interesting example is the case of the former Fox-moderator Megyn Kelly who turned from victim to perpetrator of violent discourse. After she had challenged Trump in an interview for Fox-TV in August 2024 he famously retorted on CNN that there was “blood coming out of her wherever”. Now, as a host of her own “The Megyn Kelly Show”, she attacks adversaries inside and outside of the MAGA movement in a similar disgraceful way.
The brutality of language has become integral part of the business model of podcasters like Kelly and openly fascist influencers like Nick Fuentes and is now being sold as delivering freedom of speech and “authenticity”. It is a business model driven by the US-tech-oligarchs, libertarians turned authoritarians, who are now trying to force this system of processed polarization without any limits onto European countries.
The so-called “authenticity” is where the supply of vitriol by Trump’s acolytes and public demand for easy solutions to long-standing problems meet. When hatreds are algorithmically packaged into the filter bubbles of social media it is easy for young men to “liberate” themselves from their perceived slights and discrimination by propagating violence against groups they feel are responsible for their predicament – that is women, migrants and non-white people. These kinds of men used to denigrate the weak at the local bar down the road. Now they use their power to proselytize their prejudices to millions of denizens on X - and feel superior.
Donald Trump has just been the instigator and incarnation of what has been happening, in on- and offline space over the last decade: an unbelievable acceptance of violence, actions and transgressions that were not even imaginable before; whilst the US has become a society of many lonely, self-centred citizens full of grievances and hatred, or just passive and numb.
The belief that such a resurgence of violent rhetoric and authoritarian action was impossible marks a conceptional failure of liberalism. It started with a Political Science which to this day “can’t grasp Trumpism,” as Jason Blakely points out in an excellent essay in “Harpers”. The data-driven theories of social sciences and the polling industry wedded to the structuralist thinking of liberalism, Blakely argues, could not make sense of “MAGAs dramatic ideological mutation on the right, a homegrown fusion of celebrity, neoliberal boss culture, Christian nationalism, and autocratic notions of the executive”.
The fallacy went on with a legacy media whose journalists thought that it would suffice to enumerate Trump’s lies to convince the country of his unworthiness. It has been exacerbated by a legal community whose liberal members thought that the mantra of “Unitary Executive Theory” was just a quirky interpretation of the constitution by a few arch-conservative judges and not a pathway to autocratic governance. And the general misunderstanding of MAGA culminated in the Democratic Party’s deeply felt but naïve belief in policy driven change. What the technocrats and professionals in the country’s main institutions could not fathom was that the men and the movement behind Trump were ready to break with the ideological world of liberalism and all its rules and regulations.
And the failure of perception ends with those members of the voting public who would downplay the dangers of routing for Donald Trump with their own excuses of disbelief: “Trump is just Trump” or “he’s just saying it”. Well, he has been doing it, too. Yet, according to most recent polls, even today up to 40 % of adults and 70% of the Republican base would still vote for Donald Trump, a deranged and vile would-be autocrat. But if the liberal elite has conspicuously failed to grasp the phenomena of Trump and MAGA how do you expect the average voter in Kansas to be any different? Whilst Trump’s right-wing base revels in his application of violent digressions from the liberal rulebook most Republican voters had just gone to the ballot box to express their general dissatisfaction without realizing the long-term consequences for the society they live in. And some of them might even do so again, no matter what.
This spreading acceptance of violence and yearning for autocratic governance is not a purely American but a global phenomenon. From Chile to Indonesia sympathizers of former dictators have been winning in recent elections. The only democracy in the Middle East has been moving dramatically to the right. The EU suffers from an illiberal backlash. Right-wing parties comparable to MAGA are on the cusp of winning in the forthcoming regional and national elections and running governments thereafter. Everywhere social media are driving these developments as they do in the United States. The resurgence of right-wing and violent-prone politics is a global phenomenon.
Yet, Donald Trump is distinct in his performative skills as an entertaining avenger, formative in his total capture of the public sphere and exemplary due to his position at the helm of a global power. With his political fate faltering his “inferno of hate” (The Atlantic) might even be intensifying, giving further license to his radical base to act out their feeling of superiority against the groups they blame for their perceived loss of status.
In that sense Trump’s vicious remarks about the murder of a liberal Hollywood director might have just been the next step towards the debasement of American norms and values. More than any other political atrocity, lie or crime of corruption this debasement of American democracy will be Donald Trump’s most enduring legacy.
Merry Christmas and a better 2026 to you all.
(Image: President Trump at a White House Press Conference in February 2025; Dan Scavino, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons)