Trump's 'petty tyrant' revenge tour is rife with 'supervillain gimmicks': analysis
U.S. President Donald Trump reacts after signing an executive order to create a White House Olympics task force to handle security and other issues related to the LA 2028 summer Olympics in the South Court Auditorium on the White House campus in Washington, D.C., U.S., August 5, 2025. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
MSNBC's opinion writer Hayes Brown says that President Donald Trump is not only being a "petty tyrant" in his quest to persecute his perceived enemies, but the allegations he has tossed at them shows a "startling lack of creativity," relegated to "the realm of supervillain gimmicks."
Brown says this is most evident in the recent indictment against Trump's former national security adviser John Bolton, in which "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."
New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey, Brown says, "are also facing minor-league versions of the big-league crimes and civil infractions Trump was accused of."
"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," Brown says.
The president's pettiness, Brown argues, goes beyond "using the criminal justice system to target" his enemies.
"He’s also been using the ongoing federal government shutdown as an excuse to torment Democrats as a group," he writes.
Trump's brand of pettiness, Brown says, is pure.
"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," he says. "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."
The problem with Trump's pettiness, Brown says, is that he's "seldom right in his quest for vengeance."
"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," Brown writes.
"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," he says.
