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By Christopher Roberts
Vice President, Publishing & Subscriber Strategy
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As a thoroughly vindictive person, one of my favorite plays from my university days was The Revenger’s Tragedy, a blood-soaked Jacobean classic. It concerns a man called, suitably enough, Vindice. By the end of the play, Vindice has dispatched his archenemy, along with most of the ruling family. All he has to do is keep quiet. Instead, he boastfully confesses everything and is sentenced to death. “’Tis time to die,” he says, “when we are ourselves our foes.”
That was 1606. It’s now 2026, but House Democrats might want to read it before January.
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After the Republican midterms massacre, Carlo Versano’s story on the results also noted that some Democrats have already floated impeaching Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, or President Donald Trump himself, over the war in Iran.
On the Fairness Meter, more readers rated that story left-leaning than right-leaning. I think this is understandable. The losing side never wants that loss to be rubbed in its face.
John Payne, a subscriber who wrote in after the results, said much the same. “The surprise will be if Democrats can refrain from concentrating on Trump long enough to come up with an actual plan to lower prices, get out of Iran, repair our reputation abroad,” he wrote. “Many Republicans repudiated Trump by voting Blue and the Democratic Party owes them something.”
I think that last sentence is perceptive. Reconciliation usually trumps revenge.
In 1998, House Republicans pursued President Bill Clinton through the autumn and lost five seats in that November’s midterms. Republicans impeached Clinton anyway. Gallup put his approval at 73 percent the day after the vote, the highest of his presidency.
Trump knows this better than anyone. He has been impeached twice and acquitted twice. When Fulton County booked him in August 2023, his campaign started selling the mugshot on T-shirts and mugs under the slogan “NEVER SURRENDER” within hours. It raised $7.1 million. Fifteen months later he was back in the White House.
Trump said after the midterm elections that he had “a right to veto everything. But I don’t want to be just sitting there for two years vetoing everything.” He’s 80 and term-limited. He may not mean it, but impeachment proceedings would guarantee Democrats never find out and, more importantly, break the bargain with those voters who’d already repudiated him.
Revenge is always tempting. Sometimes, it’s morally justifiable, and we don’t know what Trump has in store over the next two years. What it isn’t, usually, is good politics. The collateral damage would be to exhausted voters who simply wanted the direction of the country to change. They might be tempted to take their own revenge if Democrats play the impeachment card, and so the cycle would continue.
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