By Helen Reynolds
Donald Trump gets called petty all the time – thin-skinned, quick to hold grudges, always looking to even the score. People usually say it with a smirk or an eye-roll, like it’s just a quirky little flaw you laugh off.
But it’s not harmless, and it’s not just a personality thing. When someone like that gets hold of real power, pettiness turns into a way of running the show – and that’s a much bigger deal.
Most leaders figure out pretty early that criticism comes with the job. They put some distance between themselves and the noise: staff who take the heat, rules that keep personal stuff separate from official decisions. Trump does the exact opposite. For him, everything personal is political, and everything political is personal. Loyalty isn’t about the country or the job – it’s about him.
To Trump, if you criticise him, you’re not just disagreeing – you’re betraying him.
If you oppose him, it’s not normal politics – it’s a personal attack.
Institutions aren’t supposed to be neutral; they’re weapons to reward mates and smash enemies.
That’s why he never lets a slight go.
He remembers who spoke out against him, who testified, who didn’t cheer loud enough, who made him look silly even for a second. Years later, when he’s got the chance, he settles it. Old friends don’t just get pushed aside – they get punished. Critics don’t get argued with – they get humiliated. Winning the point matters less than making sure everyone knows who’s boss.
What we casually call “pettiness” is actually something more calculated: he keeps grudges alive and uses them on purpose.
He doesn’t even try to hide it. He brags about it. He tells crowds he’ll “get even,” go after the people who wronged him, make them pay. It’s not a slip of the tongue – it’s part of the deal he offers supporters: “You feel disrespected too, right? I’ll use this power to fix that for us.”
And it works. A lot of people do feel ignored or looked down on by the system, the media, the elites. Trump taps straight into that anger and says, “Forget fixing things – let’s just hit back.” Loyalty beats competence. Fear beats straight talk.
The downside? Everything starts to rot from the inside.
In government, people quickly learn that telling the truth can get you fired, while kissing up keeps you safe. Better to stay quiet than offer real advice. Decisions stop being about what’s best for the country and start being about what won’t upset the boss. The whole system gets brittle – too busy with score-settling and paranoia to do its job properly.
The same thing happens on the world stage. Allies get treated based on how nice they are to Trump personally, not on shared interests or values. Flatter him and you’re golden; call him out and you’re frozen out. Long-standing partnerships get strained not over big strategic differences, but because someone hurt his feelings.
Diplomacy turns into mood swings. Deals become all about what’s in it for him right now. Stability depends on whether someone said something nice that day.
That’s why seasoned diplomats and officials always look a bit rattled around Trump. They’re used to negotiating interests and trade-offs. He negotiates feelings – compliments buy you time, criticism gets you payback.
Calling it immaturity lets it off too easy. Immaturity suggests someone might grow out of it. Trump hasn’t – he’s got better at it.
The real issue isn’t that he’s touchy. It’s that he uses the enormous power of the presidency with basically no brakes – turning resentment into policy and grudges into justification.
History is full of examples of leaders who made everything personal, who saw enemies in every corner, who treated government like their private kingdom. It rarely ends with a bang – it just slowly wears everything down. One “exception” here, one “they had it coming” there, and before long the rules don’t mean much anymore.
Trump’s fans say the stories are overblown, or that shaking things up takes a bit of toughness. Fair enough – but shaking things up because you’re mad isn’t reform. It’s just damage. And damage spreads.
So yeah, Trump is petty. But “petty” is too small a word for it.
What he does is deliberate, systematic, and it pays off for him politically. It’s not a side note to how he governs – it is how he governs.
In someone with that much power and that little self-control, it’s not just a character flaw.
It’s a red flag.
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Surly and thankless, hateful and humorless, feeble and incompetent, boastful, belligerent and boorish, petty, petulant and predatory, vain, venal and vindictive, carping, cantankerous and deeply, deeply corrupt. Surrounded by opportunistic flunkies, sycophants and cronies, America’s Caligula is a desperate man, mentally and physically deteriorating before the eyes of the entire world, and it is clear he will do anything he can to distract from the Epstein files. https://open.substack.com/pub/maximgrosky/p/wag-the-dog-20?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
Surely no other herd animals accept the worst as a natural leader, one wth deficiencies, insanities, perversions, solid incapability. The USA, a society of claimed exceptionalism, is exceptionally ignorant, ill-mannered, under-educated, unaware, rough, often bluntly stupidly loud. Led by USA shittery and selfcentred adventurism, the world reels, bruised. Somehow, many others must rise, unite and stop this evil. But, Trump is backed by a gang of the foulest filthites…
Max Gross makes an interesting link to Ancient Rome ….. perhaps somebody could advise how similar Roman characters were handled in their time.
Modern America is far from the Hollywood’s ”American Dream” and today is really ”The Nightmare on Main Street”.
There’s a rare (and not yet formalised) chronic trauma symptom occasionally observed in survivors of near fatal events (e.g. plane crashes, attempted assassinations, etc) which appear to engender in the survivor delusions of not mere omnipotence (which in Trump’s case were well-established anyway) but of invincibility, which masquerade to deceive all and sundry that the protagonist is in robust health until the inevitable self-combust.
I’m nurturing a pet theory that Trump’s personality has similarly shifted into this irrevocable extreme stage of trauma-induced psychosis since his failed assassination attempt, and that the slow creep of his cult status and murderous imperialism has been reinforced by the criminal designs of his MAGA cronies, his self-enriching parasitic family, and a complicit media.
The movie ‘Fearless’ gives an idea of the syndrome: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fearless_(1993_film)
Whatever, the foxes are back in charge of the henhouse at Animal Farm.
The USA has always been a state of paranoia, flim-flam, cover-ups and unbridled corruption. Its quest for money and power has increasingly been driven by loopholes, criminality and exceptionalism. Its Constitution and political system frames that perfectly.
Trump over his entire life as a loser wreaking vengeance, as pretender and now POTUS, has learned the landscape, and dragooned the Congress, the executive, the institutions, the lawyers, the courts, the judiciary, the police, the CIA, the Pentagon and the military. And in the main, subsumed the mainstream media.
America got what was coming to it, and now the whole world is being pushed to take the punishment. Because of their prior complicity they are shitting themselves.
Madmen and lunatics one and all, the whole show is collapsing in on itself, the trick is not to be dragged into THEIR fear (false evidence appearing real) and that’s from MSM.
What comes to my mind is someone of the likes of U.S. Army Captain Benjamin L. Willard, a veteran assassin that took out the nut case from Apocalypse Now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDTwL15ZHZs