Back in 1992 — eight years before he first ran for president and 24 years before he finally won a presidential race — Donald Trump discussed his obsession with "revenge" during an interview with Charlie Rose. Trump made it clear that he would gladly take revenge against business associates who were disloyal to him, telling Rose, "I would have wiped the floor with the guys that weren't loyal, which I will now do…. I love getting even with people."
MSNBC's Katy Tur dug up that old 1992 interview during a Friday afternoon, July 11 panel, stressing that those comments from a younger Trump made 33 years ago perfectly capture the vengeful mentality he brings to his second administration. And Tur got no argument from her two guests: The New Yorker's Susan B. Glasser and The Atlantic's Tom Nichols, a Never Trump conservative.
Nichols told Tur and Glasser, "Look, the president's an emotionally disordered person. That's been clear for a long time. It was clear in his first term…. When he says things like, you know, 'I live for revenge,' you know he's telling you the truth. Take him seriously…. In his first term, he had the so-called adults in the room. This time, he's brought with him people who also are kind of oddball, disordered folks…. who don't have any interest in the actual mission of the institutions they are leading."
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Nichols lamented that Trump's appointees — including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem — "don't see themselves as leading institutions" that "perform missions for the people of the United States."
"They see themselves as part of a team of lib-owning trolls who are going to infuriate the president's enemies, and they, too, are going to get their ounce of revenge for the people who thought, who said they were unqualified or who snickered at them," Nichols told Tur and Glasser. "I mean, (FBI Director) Kash Patel is basically trying to figure out who's laughing at him at the water coolers at the FBI….. These are really petty, small people who don't seem to have any interest in doing the job that the Senate, for whatever reason, confirmed them to do….. That attitude flows from the top."
Nichols argued that Trump's obsession with loyalty recalls the Soviet Union.
"This isn't McCarthyism," Nichols told Tur and Glasser. "This is like KGB kind of level stuff. This is the-death-of-Stalin stuff where, you know, you have expected one of these people to run down the hallway saying, 'I have documents on all of you.' Because it's all about personal loyalty. And it does raise the question, well, while all this is going on, who's catching spies, who's chasing kidnappers?"
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Glasser warned that the U.S. is suffering chaos "across many different federal agencies."
"Trump and his advisers have advanced a maximalist view of executive power," Glasser told Tur and Nichols.
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