Retribution Is Incompatible With Leadership.
Great leaders have always known the difference. Trump does not, and we are all paying for it.
Video discussion for paid subscribers follows article
There is a moment that comes to most leaders eventually. The moment when they have the power to punish someone who wronged them, and they have to decide what to do with it. It is a clarifying moment, because what a leader does with that power tells you almost everything about what kind of leader they actually are.
Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in a South African prison. He emerged in 1990 to lead a country that had imprisoned, tortured, and humiliated him — a country in which the people who had built and enforced apartheid still held positions of power, still owned most of the land, still controlled most of the institutions. The temptation to exact revenge was not abstract. It was concrete, immediate, and politically available. The moral majority of his movement would have cheered it. And he declined. Not out of weakness, and not because he had forgiven what had been done to him or to his people, but because he understood something fundamental about power: that leaders who spend their authority on retribution are not making lives better for the people following them. They are indulging themselves. And self-indulgence, at the scale of the presidency, is a form of theft from the people you were chosen to serve.
Abraham Lincoln delivered his second inaugural address on March 4, 1865, with the Civil War nearly over and four years of catastrophic loss behind him. The men who had taken up arms against the United States were still alive. The politicians who had sanctioned secession still held influence in their states. Lincoln had every political and moral justification to govern the reconstruction of the South as a punishment. He chose instead to offer “malice toward none” and “charity for all.” Historians still argue about whether that generosity was wise in every particular. What is not arguable is why he chose it: because he understood that a country reunited by fear is not actually reunited, and that the purpose of the presidency is to hold the country together, not to settle the president’s personal scores.
Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon — at enormous personal political cost, knowing it would likely end his presidency — because he concluded that the country’s recovery mattered more than Nixon’s prosecution. You can disagree with any of these specific decisions. But the thread running through all of them is the same: the recognition that the presidency is not personal property, that its powers are held in trust for the public, and that using those powers to gratify the president’s private grievances is a fundamental corruption of the office.
Changing How You Read the News: Here’s Why It Matters
Americans aren’t just disagreeing; we’re being shown completely different stories.
Every day, news outlets decide what to publish. In polarized media environments, audience demographics can split coverage. If you rely on only one side of the media spectrum, you could miss stories entirely, not because it isn’t credible, but because it doesn’t align with certain editorial priorities.
That’s why I’m often asked where I go to do research for my reporting. One of the main research tools I use is called Ground News. Ground News shows me how stories are being covered from different political perspectives, and it highlights “blindspots” where only left-wing or right-wing media is covering a story.
That kind of visibility is rare right now, and it changes how you understand the news. I’ve worked out a deal with them; if you want that level of insight every day, head to GroundNews.com/AdamK and subscribe to get 40% off the Vantage plan, the one I use.
Ground News is subscriber-funded, so they don’t rely on ads that could introduce bias. By subscribing, you support both our channel and their independent team working to keep the media transparent.
Donald Trump announced his candidacy for a second term at Mar-a-Lago in November 2022 with a phrase that was not a policy position or a governing vision. It was a personal declaration: “In 2024, I am your retribution.” He was not speaking to voters as a representative asking for their trust. He was speaking to followers as a leader promising to use public power for private payback. That promise has defined his second term as comprehensively as any policy he has enacted, and its costs are only beginning to be fully understood.
What Retribution Actually Costs
The case against political revenge is not primarily a moral one, though the moral case is straightforward enough. The deeper case is institutional and strategic: a government organized around the personal grievances of its leader cannot simultaneously be organized around the public interest. Every dollar of political capital spent on punishment is a dollar not spent on governance. Every hour the Justice Department spends pursuing James Comey over a beach photograph is an hour not spent on violent crime, financial fraud, or the thousand other things the department exists to address. Every Republican senator who moderates a public position out of fear is a senator who is no longer representing constituents.
The costs compound in ways that are not always visible from the outside. When Trump endorsed Ken Paxton over four-term Texas Senator John Cornyn — a reliable ally who had supported the president’s agenda in nearly every vote, the immediate effect was Cornyn’s defeat in a Republican primary. The deeper effect was the message it sent to every other Republican officeholder: loyalty is not measured by votes. It is measured by submission. The distinction matters enormously, because it means the threshold for safety keeps moving. There is no position moderate enough, no record supportive enough, no silence sufficiently complete to guarantee protection. You are safe only until you are not.
That dynamic, applied consistently across the Republican caucus, produces a legislature that is less deliberative and more performative. Members optimize for visible loyalty rather than sound policy because visible loyalty is what the primary electorate rewards. The bills that get written, the hearings that get held, the investigations that get launched — all of these are shaped by the question of how the president will react, rather than what the country needs. This is not a new phenomenon in American politics, but it has never operated at this scale or with this degree of explicit presidential direction. Trump is not merely influencing the Republican Party. He is reorganizing it around his personal emotional requirements.
The Machinery of Retribution
What makes the current situation different from ordinary political hardball is the institutional apparatus being deployed in its service. Previous presidents had grievances. Some acted on them in ways that were petty or inappropriate. But the systematic redirection of federal law enforcement toward the punishment of political opponents represents something that sits in a different category — not just a norm violation but a structural corruption of the institutions themselves.
The Justice Department exists to enforce federal law impartially. Its credibility — and therefore its effectiveness — depends on the public’s belief that prosecutorial decisions are made on the basis of evidence and law, not on the basis of the president’s personal feelings about the defendant. When that belief erodes, the consequences are not merely reputational. Grand juries become skeptical. Witnesses become reluctant. Judges become more scrutinizing. Defense attorneys become more aggressive. The department’s ability to prosecute actual crimes — crimes that have nothing to do with the president’s enemies list — is diminished because the institution’s credibility has been spent on cases that look, and in some instances demonstrably are, politically motivated.
The second Comey indictment is the clearest example. The federal government charged a former FBI director with threatening the president on the basis of a photograph of seashells arranged on a beach. The case was investigated for eleven months by career agents and prosecutors. It was then brought by political appointees who had every reason to understand that it would be perceived as, and argued to be, an abuse of prosecutorial power. The indictment forced Comey to defend himself, to incur legal costs, and to endure the reputational damage that comes with any federal criminal charge, regardless of outcome. That was the point. The indictment was not a good-faith effort to prosecute a crime. It was punishment administered through the machinery of justice. The difference between those two things is the difference between a republic and something else.
The same logic extends to the $1.8 billion Anti-Weaponization Fund, which uses the settlement of a lawsuit Trump filed against his own government to create a compensation pool for January 6 defendants. It extends to the acting Attorney General’s declaration that Trump, his family, and his businesses are permanently exempt from government investigation, including tax audits. It extends to the FBI’s seizure of a Washington Post reporter’s devices without a subpoena, the FCC’s threatened review of ABC’s broadcast licenses after a late-night host declined to apologize for a joke, and the effort to use the pardon power to benefit donors who had given millions to Trump-aligned PACs in the weeks before their clemency was granted.
Taken individually, each of these can be rationalized or explained away. Taken together, they describe a government that has been substantially reorganized around the personal interests and personal grievances of one man. That is not what the framers designed. It is precisely what they feared.
The Larger Cost
There is a version of this essay that ends with a list of the specific things Trump has done and a conclusion that he is a bad person. That essay is easy to write and not particularly useful because it has been written – a thousand times. The more important argument is structural, because bad people have held power before and the republic has survived. What the republic has not been asked to survive, at least not in the modern era, is the systematic normalization of retribution as a governing philosophy.
When retribution becomes normalized — when senators expect to be primaried for procedural independence, when journalists expect their devices to be seized, when entertainers understand that their networks will be threatened if they tell the wrong jokes, when prosecutors understand that the measure of their success is whether they prosecuted the president’s enemies — the behavior of every actor in the system changes. People self-censor. Institutions become cautious. The range of permissible dissent narrows, not through explicit prohibition but through the rational calculation of consequences. This is how democracies hollow out long before they formally end. Not with a coup but with accommodation, gradually and then all at once.
Mandela understood something important about this. His decision to pursue reconciliation rather than retribution in South Africa was not primarily an act of personal generosity. It was a strategic judgment about what a functioning democratic society requires. A society organized around grievance cannot simultaneously be organized around shared citizenship. The two are in fundamental tension. You can build a coalition on resentment — Trump proved that — but you cannot govern a country with it, because governing requires persuasion, compromise, and the recognition that the people who disagree with you are still, in some meaningful sense, yours to serve.
Lincoln knew this. Washington knew it. Ford knew it at the cost of his presidency. The leaders who chose restraint at moments when they had both the power and arguably the justification to exact revenge did so not out of weakness or naivety, but out of a clear-eyed understanding of what their office was for and what it was not for.
The presidency of the United States is not a vehicle for personal satisfaction. It is not a mechanism for settling scores or rewarding loyalty or punishing insufficiently complete submission. It is, at its best, the highest expression of the idea that a free people can govern themselves — that they can choose a leader, trust that leader with enormous power, and have reasonable confidence that the power will be used in their interest rather than the leader’s.
That idea is not dead. But it is under more pressure than it has been in a very long time. The people who understand why it matters have an obligation to say so, clearly and consistently, for as long as it takes.
I spent years as a Republican in Congress watching what this president does to people who disagree with him. I know what it costs to say this out loud. I also know what it costs not to. The second cost is higher.
It always is.
Video discussion for paid subscribers (I discuss the difference between retribution and accountability, and why accountability is necessary.
