United States President is burning with grudges and he can’t let old feuds die.
Time and again President of the United States Donald Trump revives past battles like an old warrior who is consumed by the fights he’s already waged, offering a glimpse into a personality that is built on conflict, the search for an enemy and an insatiable quest for personal victories.
But Trump’s refusal to let bygones be bygones is also a political device. He’s used the endless personal battles to stir up his base and give them something to unite against. The feuds offer definition to his life, his business, his 2016 campaign — where he picked off a golden generation of GOP candidates one by one — and now his presidency.
This past weekend, Trump opened a new front in his bitter feud with John McCain — even though the Republican senator from Arizona has been dead for nearly seven months.
The President mocked the Vietnam War hero, inaccurately for coming in “last in his class,” and rebuked him for voting against a GOP bid to repeal Obamacare.
Trump can rarely leave “Crooked” Hillary Clinton alone either — apparently not content with beating her in the 2016 election.
He rarely gets through a week without taking a shot at former President Barack Obama — and often seems largely motivated by undoing his predecessor’s legacy — perhaps in revenge for being mocked at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner in 2011.
And he’s still simmering over past showdowns with other nemeses, such as the NFL: Some of the league’s aficionados have traced Trump’s fury over players taking a knee and team owners’ reactions to his anger at failing to secure a franchise in the league in the 1980s.
“The $40,000,000 Commissioner must now make a stand,” Trump demanded in a tweet at the start of last season.
Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions was never allowed to forget the President’s fury at Sessions’ recusing himself from the Russia investigation — and Trump’s anger is prone to pop up from time to time even though the former Alabama senator left office last year.
The President, for instance, blasted Sessions as “another beauty” in a tweet storm against senior Justice Department officials in February.
For a time, Trump was involved in an ugly personal spat with NBA superstar LeBron James — insinuating in a tweet last year that King James wasn’t very smart — one of many of the President’s altercations that have seemed to have racial overtones.
The President fed another ancient grudge over the weekend — taking a new shot at NBC’s “Saturday Night Live,” which has caught his ire repeatedly because of Alec Baldwin’s searing impression of him.
And he never lets up on his duel with reporters, who he has called “enemies of the people.”
Trump has his foreign targets too, and returns to them again and again. He harbors a particular grudge for German Chancellor Angela Merkel — but any US ally that he sees as freeloading off American generosity is especially likely to get a tongue lashing.