Bracing for Trump's Revenge

Donald Trump has never made a secret of his penchant for personal vengeance. He boasts about it, tweets about it, tells long, rambling stories about it on the transcontinental speaking circuit. When, last year, he was asked to identify a favorite Bible passage, he cited “an eye for an eye.” And in his 2007 book, Think Big and Kick Ass, he devoted an entire chapter to the joys of exacting revenge.

“My motto is: Always get even,” he wrote. “When somebody screws you, screw them back in spades.”

For those who have crossed Trump, then, these are understandably anxious times. As he enters the White House and takes the reins of the most powerful government in the world, a small cadre of high-profile conservatives—the haters, the losers, the Never-Trumpers who never fell in line—has found itself wondering whether their party’s president will use his new powers to settle old scores.

“The question is not whether he’s vengeful,” conservative columnist Ben Shapiro told me. “The question is how willing he is to use the levers of government to exact that revenge.”

This is—critics in the conservative movement. He spent months relentlessly prosecuting the candidate on TV and Twitter, and in March set off a media frenzy when he abruptly quit his job at and blasted the company’s then-CEO Steve Bannon for being a “bully” who had turned the site into “Trump’s personal Pravda.”