How the GOP Enabled Trump’s Retribution Pledge

Aaron Blake: “The line validates long-held suspicions that Trump’s 2024 campaign amounts to something of a ‘revenge tour.’ Trump has disputed that his goal is to stick it to his enemies; now he’s admitting that it is a revenge tour of sorts — if not for him personally, then for his supporters.”

“But as much as anything, it reflects just how much the Republican Party, despite its apparent interest in turning the page in 2024, has enabled Trump to rise again. There is no ‘revenge tour’ or ‘retribution’ without the GOP playing into speculative and often-fanciful ideas about the wrongs supposedly visited on its base — and which accordingly demand such vengeance. And there is no 2024 hopeful better situated to capitalize on that sense of persecution and injustice.”
 
“In that regard, the party and its allies made a series of fateful decisions in the three months after the 2020 election.”