TRUMP

WHAT TRUMP STANDS FOR 81
that he screws people back ten times over not because he enjoys it,
but because it helps build his reputation. Yet Trump will even pursue
revenge at great personal and political cost to himself. When Khizr
and Ghazala Khan, the parents of a deceased Muslim soldier, criticized
Trump for his remarks about Islam and Muslims, Trump relentlessly
attacked the family on social media and in interviews. 315 The move
was deeply unwise from a public relations perspective; the gracious
thing to do would be to have said “The Khans and I may disagree, but
I respect their son’s sacrifice” rather than Trump’s strategy of insisting
that he had made plenty of sacrifices of his own. But the “when they
hit you, hit back harder” philosophy allows no exceptions, even for
the grieving family of a dead Army captain. Trump was willing to sabotage
his own reputation among military families, purely so he could
continue to demonstrate that he does not take crap.
Trump’s own descriptions of his vengeance-first philosophy make
it clear that it is about little more than his own satisfaction at seeing
other people get hurt. In one of his books, Trump describes how he
asked a former employee to call someone she knew in order to secure
a favor. When the woman refused, citing ethical concerns, Trump
vowed to destroy her, seeing her unwillingness to help him as a traitorous
act. As he writes: “She ended up losing her home. Her husband,
who was only in it for the money, walked out on her and I was glad…
I can’t stomach disloyalty…and now I go out of my way to make her
life miserable.” 316
When Virgin billionaire Richard Branson met with Trump, he was
appalled by Trump’s “vindictive streak,” later writing that Trump’s
obsession with revenge had frightening implications for his use of
political power. Branson said that over lunch, Trump “began telling
me about how he had asked a number of people for help after his latest
bankruptcy and how five of them were unwilling to help. He told
me he was going to spend the rest of his life destroying these five people.”
317 Branson was “baffled why he had invited me to lunch solely to