2 days ago

Revenge review: a luridly fascinating smorgasbord of Trump’s score settling

Alex Isenstadt is a senior political reporter at Axios and an alumnus of Politico. For a decade, he has covered Donald Trump and the Republicans. In March 2015, an Isenstadt dispatch blared: “GOP hopefuls rush toward starting gates.” The story made no mention of the man who would win the 2016 election, lose in 2020, then win again in ’24.

But like all political reporters, Isenstadt has now mentioned Donald Trump plenty.

Revenge, Isenstadt’s first book, is aptly titled. In office only two months, Trump has already made settling scores and torching enemies a hallmark of his second term.

At a speech to a joint session of Congress, he used Joe Biden as punching bag and foil. Now, he declares that pardons issued by his predecessor are “void” because Biden maybe used an autopen. Whether Pam Bondi, Trump’s attorney general, brings charges against recipients of those pardons – Hunter Biden, Liz Cheney or Anthony Fauci – remains of course to be seen.

Bondi once said, as Isenstadt recalls, that if Trump won, “the prosecutors will be prosecuted” and the “investigators will be investigated”. In that spirit, Ed Martin, acting US attorney for DC, unsuccessfully attempted to push a federal grand jury to indict Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, for remarks made in 2020 about Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, two of Trump’s picks to the supreme court.

Trump and his followers claim to be committed to freedom of speech. In reality, it’s not just graduate students with green cards who labor under the gun.

Revenge is a delectable smorgasbord of scoop, dish and bile. A luridly fascinating read, it jauntily describes the efforts of Trump and his minions to gut, fillet and disembowel Ron DeSantis, Florida’s humorless governor whose short-lived bid for the 2024 Republican nomination quickly morphed into a joke.

Beyond beating DeSantis, Trump strived to humiliate him. And succeeded.

“To anyone who listened, Trump would tell the tale – and who the hell knew how much of it was true,” Isenstadt writes. “DeSantis came to the Oval Office, ‘tears in his eyes’ to plead for his endorsement.

“‘He was like a beggar,’ Trump told people aboard Trump Force One in June 2023, as he blasted Sinéad O’Connor’s Nothing Compares 2 U from a portable speaker … ‘I could have said, Drop to your fucking knees, Ron.’”

You’ve got to love seeing Trump, DeSantis and Sinéad O’Connor in the same sentence.

Isenstadt also captures the Trump campaign rehashing a litany of the governor’s stranger moments: shoving chicken fingers into his jacket, clipping his toenails in the back of his security vehicle, or “the time he had a bathroom mishap aboard an airplane”. Revenge does not elaborate on that last item, which is probably a good thing.

Snack food emerged as Ron’s achilles heel. In the same nausea-inducing spirit as Senator Amy Klobuchar reportedly eating a salad with her comb, DeSantis was said to have snarfed pudding with his fingers during a flight in 2019.

“I don’t remember ever doing that,” DeSantis told Piers Morgan. “Maybe when I was a kid.” Pro tip: if you’re running for president but denying you’re an awkward slob, you’re losing.

“Trump didn’t just want to stop DeSantis from winning the Republican nomination,” to quote Isenstadt. “He wanted to destroy him and make it impossible for him to run for anything ever again.”

Mission accomplished.

Isenstadt also examines the on-again-off-again relationship between Trump and Rupert Murdoch. According to Isenstadt, their interactions were moored in profit and convenience. During Trump’s bid for the nomination in 2016, the New York Post, Murdoch-owned, denied Trump the respect he craved. When DeSantis vied for the nomination in 2024, Murdoch appeared to be in his corner. That wounded Trump’s ego.

“That Rupert is such a piece of shit, he’s so cold,” Isenstadt captures Trump thundering, privately. He castigated Murdoch in public too, accusing him of “aiding and abetting the DESTRUCTION OF AMERICA”. As for James Murdoch, Rupert’s son? “He’s a crazy fucking liberal,” Trump complained to Tucker Carlson.

Other sources bolster Isenstadt’s take on Murdoch and Trump. According to Fire and Fury, Michael Wolff’s first bestseller that birthed a genre, Murdoch called Trump “a fucking idiot” after the two men ended a call. In The Fall, Wolff’s Murdoch book from 2023, Wolff wrote that Murdoch frequently wished Trump dead, despite the fact he was a monster Murdoch helped create, and who made him even richer.

“Of all Trump’s implacable enemies, Murdoch had become a frothing-at-the-mouth one,” Wolff wrote. “Trump’s death became a Murdoch theme: ‘We would all be better off … ?’ ‘This would all be solved if … ’ ‘How could he still be alive, how could he?’ ‘Have you seen him? Have you seen what he looks like?’”

Fast forward. Trump is living large, while Murdoch’s life mirrors Succession, the HBO hit about vicious family rivalry that was based squarely on … the Murdochs.

In conclusion, Isenstadt argues convincingly that “revenge” remains the byword for the second Trump administration. He reviews ABC’s $16m settlement of a Trump defamation suit, and the consumer fraud complaint Trump filed against Ann Selzer, the Des Moines Register and its parent company, Gannett. Selzer’s pre-election Iowa poll “so angered him” – because she had Kamala Harris ahead. Defendants have moved to dismiss the lawsuit. Trump’s opposition is due by 28 March, with briefing by all parties by mid-April.

Isenstadt also recalls that House Republicans released a report calling for Liz Cheney, once their own congresswoman from Wyoming, to be investigated by the FBI for her work on the January 6 committee. She too received a Biden pardon.

Trump responded by posting: “Cheney could be in a lot of trouble.” Isenstadt ends on an ominous note: “His quest for revenge appeared under way.”