Say what you will about Donald Trump. The man can hold a grudge.
So, too, apparently, do the neo-Nazis who marched on the Ohio state capital over the weekend. Freshly emboldened by Donald Trump’s re-election and competition with a rival white supremacist group in Ohio, they carried Nazi paraphernalia, shouted racist chants, and provoked a lot of criticism from local authorities.
And so it begins.
The thing is, many Americans nurse the racial grievances that Trump has expressed, though not as preternaturally and rabidly, perhaps, as the man who has given voice to their perceived loss of agency and entitlement.
Half of the electorate looked past Trump’s felony convictions, misogyny, uncloseted racism, open disdain for all manner of newcomers and cultural outsiders, and solidarity with people who already had more money than anyone could spend in a lifetime and saw an immediate return from their investment in his candidacy or feared he would come after them if they didn’t support him.
Appeals to better angels and more democratically inspired values missed their intended marks.
Calls for payback and cultural reckoning didn’t.
It remains to be seen how many people and institutions on the enemies list Trump has spent years assembling will be singled out for public censure, repudiation, and punishment along with the policies and programs they helped shape or were responsible for carrying out. Early indications are that the number is going to be large.
No matter how big the number is, the reckoning Trump will push during the first two years of his second administration is bound to be messy, mean, and costly. People’s lives will be damaged. Careers will be lost.
Americans who share Trump’s feelings will applaud his single-minded campaign to force his will on every part of the federal government and publicly demonstrate their resolve.
A great many of us may end up blanching at the bitter fruit Trump harvests with his campaign of retribution. But absolutely no one at that point will be able to feign surprise or blush at anything he tries to undo and everyone who is taken down along the way.
Trump and his most aggressive supporters don’t give two hoots about protecting our reputation as a people united by a constitution based on laws, only in protecting their rights and privileges. In recent years, they’ve done nothing but mock and ignore the time-honored but otherwise unenforceable norms and customs that Sir John Moulton declared more than a century ago keep us doing the right thing when no one is looking over our shoulder.
Expanding that domain for an ever larger and more diverse array of citizens is the central project and most important accomplishment of democracies. Everything Donald Trump and his White Nationalist allies say and do makes clear that their grandest desire and principal goal is to shrink that domain along with the number and variety of people who have the privilege of engaging with it.
That’s the bad news.
Here’s the good news.
Barring some unforeseen catastrophe that provides an excuse for him to distract us further and grab even more power – a war, plague, natural disaster, or meltdown in the global economic system come immediately to mind – he will exact less vengeance than he has in mind to deliver. His successful excesses will come back to haunt him.
These are not the faint hopes of a liberal elitist or academic scaredy cat. They are the words of someone who’s read and written about all the conservative ways people have learned to express their disconsent to know this much.
(Wait for it.)
The campaign to undo all the damage Trump and his supporters intend to do will inspire a more conservative backlash from the American public than they are capable of imagining.
No, you didn’t misread the last sentence.
Trump’s campaign of retribution will be thwarted and come undone by people and institutions whose caretakers will renew our commitment to each other not by adding more new rights and privileges but by restoring the duties and obligations of citizenship that all kinds of people had come to practice and think was part of their birthright. Whether they were born here or not.
Donald Trump’s illiberalism won’t work long enough or on enough of us to strip the whole of us of the democratically inspired habits, customs, and norms that took centuries of trial and error to practice and enshrine in our everyday lives. These values, trials, errors, and accomplishments are “baked” into our culture. They can’t be blowtorched out no matter how hard Donald Trump tries, and they will be successfully called upon in fierce legal and extra-legal challenges to every undemocratic move he makes over the next four years.
The great irony in all the legal challenges that are already in the works and all the extra-legal challenges that will come to the streets of American towns and cities, as I just suggested, is that they will be vastly more conservative in character than the man provoking them pretends to be.
The only conservative part of Donald Trump’s game is the serious attempt to limit the right to play to those of us who look more like him. Newcomers and outsiders aren’t supposed to be able to learn how to play or even allowed to try. The more liberal parts of the game – finding out how to bend, break, and ignore rules without being held accountable for bending, breaking, and ignoring them – are supposed to remain a mystery to such people. They are no mystery to Trump and his neo-Nazis and White Nationalist allies.
Compelling evidence of black Americans’ principled rejection of such subtleties was plain on January 6, 2021, when they stayed home and tens of thousands of white people attacked the Capitol and tried to subvert the peaceful transfer of the national government. The several thousand white people who were tried and punished for breaking into the Capitol and assaulting police officers trying to protect it are now looking forward to being pardoned by the man who incited them to riot.
Like it or not, we are about to be treated to a master class in discovering the limits of accountability by Americans who will work to restore the duties and obligations of citizenship. Whether already lost – such as women’s reproductive healthcare – or in imminent danger of being further eroded – like voting privileges and birthright citizenship – the use of unrest on behalf of conservative principles and practices is one of those cultural traditions that is too firmly entrenched to deny.
Large numbers of regular Americans – men, women, and children of every color people come in, some pushing wheelchairs and strollers – will confront Capitol rioters, White Nationalists, KKK members, and neo-Nazis who’ll leave their guns at home but won’t be able to resist intimidating and pushing around unarmed people.
We will know how far down the road to illiberalism Americans have slid by the answers to two questions.
Which side will be protected by the National Guardsmen and U.S. servicemen and women Trump sends out to maintain public order?
What party will be in control of the House of Representatives and Senate after the 2024 midterm elections?
Monti is a professor of sociology at Saint Louis University.
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a“ Steel Across America” event ahead of the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11th attacks on the Ellipse near the White House on Sept. 8, 2026 in Washington, D.C. President Trump welcomed 9/ 11 first responders to the Tunnel to Towers Foundation’ s“ Steel Across America” event featuring a 16,900- pound, 21- foot steel beam recovered.
For Trump, even 9/11 is an opportunity
There was a reason organizers of the 9/11 ceremony in Manhattan told President Trump he could not speak at this year’s memorial service.
A good one, it turns out.
Because in a speech he gave on Tuesday in Washington, he did exactly what they were presumably worried about — he made it about himself.
According to The New York Times, Trump had wanted a speaking role at the service, but the National Sept. 11 Memorial and Museum, which oversees the site, said no, as they’ve maintained for the past decade-plus that the venue and event should be nonpartisan.
Trump has long used awful tragedies to either puff himself up, trash political opponents, or sell lies to the American people.
He blamed a deadly plane crash at Washington National Airport last year on diversity, equity and inclusion policies. He blamed Puerto Ricans for the devastation they endured after Hurricane Maria in 2017. He reportedly considered withholding disaster relief after the California wildfires based on the way affected regions voted. In an interview on Fox News meant to commemorate the 75th anniversary of D-Day in Normandy, he used the occasion to slam former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi…with graves of the dead behind him.
And now, as we approach the 25th anniversary of what many New Yorkers consider the darkest day in modern history, Trump has done it again.
He told a rambling, nonsensical story — one he’s told before — about going to Ground Zero just after terrorists flew two commercial jets into the twin towers. In the story, which no one has been able to verify, despite multiple attempts, he says firefighters had to carry him out of One Liberty Plaza, also known as the U.S. Steel Building, because they thought it was about to collapse.
As CNN fact checker Daniel Dale notes, there’s no evidence Trump went into this building, especially at a time when NYPD and NYFD had locked down the area. There’s no evidence that building was collapsing — in fact, it was deemed structurally sound and reopened within two months of the attacks. There’s no evidence he was carried out of it by firefighters.
But the lie isn’t even the worst part. Pretend it was all true — why would the leader of our country, and a New Yorker, decide to make that tragic day about himself?
Because that’s who Donald Trump is. He’s a malignant narcissist.
He’s also, incidentally, a terrible and ineffectual president, who’s made ill-fated decisions that he has to keep defending, and there’s nothing he won’t do to make himself look and feel better.
Within the first two minutes of his speech, he was cravenly using 9/11 to justify and promote his dumb war in Iran — two events separated by 25 years and 6,000 miles.
“And I will tell you, we’re right now fighting because we have a certain nation that wanted a nuclear weapon, they were very close to getting it, and now they have no chance at getting it. They will never have a nuclear weapon. Iran will not have a nuclear weapon. And they’ve been punished greatly. As you know, we’ve really taken it to them.”
As a New Yorker who lived through 9/11, still one of the worst days of my life, I’m utterly sickened by Trump’s crass, political, and self-promotional framing of that awful day.
And I’m relieved he won’t be given a platform to do it again on Friday’s anniversary in lower Manhattan.
Because for Trump, everything is his for the taking, and absolutely nothing is sacred.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.