More than any other president before him, Donald Trump has sought to put the “petty” in “petty tyrant.” In the last month, he’s checked several names off his perceived enemies list as the Justice Department has indicted former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James and, most recently, former national security adviser John Bolton. As disturbing as it is to witness the Department of Justice turned against Trump’s critics, the specific allegations being against those critics display either a startling lack of creativity on the part of Trump and his allies or a dedication to parallelism that would usually be relegated to the realm of supervillain gimmicks.
In Bolton’s indictment, handed up Tuesday by a federal grand jury in Maryland, we see a set of charges orders of magnitude less staggering in their blatant criminality than the allegations Trump faced after his first term for hoarding documents at Mar-a-Lago. James and Comey are also facing minor-league versions of the big-league crimes and civil infractions Trump was accused of.
James, who successfully brought a civil case against the Trump Organization for fraudulently obtaining mortgages from banks, has herself been charged with bank fraud. Likewise, Comey, who refused to stop the Russia investigation that saw several of Trump’s cohort charged with lying to Congress, is now himself accused of lying to Congress. Bolton, Comey and James have all pleaded not guilty to the charges they face.
It’s a level of “I’m rubber and you’re glue” absurdity akin to if Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who successfully secured a 34-count conviction against Trump last year, were to himself be charged with election fraud.
Trump’s pettiness extends beyond using the criminal justice system to target individuals. He’s also been using the ongoing federal government shutdown as an excuse to torment Democrats as a group. White House budget chief Russell Vought has been slowly rolling back federal funding for major projects in blue states like New York and California to much praise from his boss. Last week, Trump said that the White House would be shuttering “programs that are Democrat programs that we were opposed to. And they’re never going to come back in many cases.” (The promised list of programs that would be affected, which he said would be released on Friday, never materialized.)
Trump’s dedication to transforming perceived slights against him into government action isn’t meant to be a knock against pettiness overall. There are times where it can be a societal good, an (admittedly overly aggressive) means of enforcing the consequences for breaking the social contract. Pettiness at its purest requires being in the right, ideally both factually and morally, and still unnecessarily seeking revenge against those who wronged you.
Real pettiness is the refusal to turn the other cheek against purposeful slights, the willingness to cling to a grudge after your opponent has faced defeat. Pettiness is not merely standing one’s ground; it’s opting to sew the fields of Carthage with salt after razing the city to the ground. It’s, say, Kendrick Lamar, making his 2025 Super Bowl halftime show a 13-minute slam dunk against Drake and the (recently dismissed) defamation lawsuit Drake had filed against him.
Of course, Trump is seldom right, factually or morally, in his quest for vengeance. He may claim that these are only counterpunches, but he has never waited to go on the offense against his perceived enemies. And, unfortunately for the country, he has always lumped everyone who disagrees with him into that enemies camp.
As The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols noted earlier this year, we’ve had plenty of presidents who had tempers and a penchant for grievances. We’ve even had several of them attempt to use the power of the U.S. government as the engine of their payback. What sets Trump apart is how unfettered he is from the shame that keeps pettiness in check. Instead, he is openly willing to use all the might imbued within the presidency for the smallest of reasons, transforming any critic into a target.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
