A Grievance Presidency Is the Demon Child of the Social Media Era

By Dave Levitan | January 22, 2025 | 12:32pm

Photo by the Trump White House/Wikimedia Commons

Trumpland Donald Trump

A Grievance Presidency Is the Demon Child of the Social Media Era

Early on Wednesday morning, President Donald Trump lashed out at Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde, who in her inaugural sermon on Tuesday had asked him to show mercy in particular toward the LGBTQ community. “She brought her church into the World of politics in a very ungracious way,” he said on Truth Social. “She was nasty in tone, and not compelling or smart.” He called her a “Radical Left hard line Trump hater” for her sermon, which also included the galling claim that most immigrants are not actually criminals.

Hours before, on Tuesday, one of the flurry of executive orders issued on Trump’s first day in office included a broadside at the entire wind power industry. It halted offshore wind development and at least temporarily stopped permitting for any wind power project, which could even extend to wind farms slated for private land. These are, essentially, the same thing.

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Trump’s entire political existence is fundamentally a series of grievances. Sometimes these are immediate issues, things that are literally in front of his face right now — usually on the television — and sometimes they are of a more deep and ingrained sort, smoldering inside the slowly rotting brain of someone still more fundamentally at home among the celebrity puns of Page Six than the White House. And these grievances, popping up fresh each day or emerging from the recesses, damp and rank, have historically then made their way to his social media accounts. Sure, sometimes he says things on TV, or at a rally, but it’s all more or less the same: soundbites, (un)tidily packaged pieces of hardened bile, sent out into the world to carom off his supporters and enemies alike, plinko-ing down through the culture until it, maybe, yields a result.

Before 2017, and in particular during the Biden administration, the grievances were important in the sense that they acted as the driving force for an entire political party and its supporters. As president, though, they become something else, if not quite laws just yet then at least a thrust in that direction. And in his new term’s earliest days there seems to be a more directed approach to the alchemical desire to turn spite into governance, to transmogrify the sense of being wronged — everything and everyone, to Trump, has either wronged him or will soon do so — into enforceable policy.

That a second term would be better organized, or at least mildly more prepared or disciplined, than the first has long been warned, and while it’s too early to say where on the malevolence-incompetence dial this one will land there is at least a hint of the warning coming true. The pile of executive orders, ranging in target from trans people to the Paris Agreement to birthright citizenship, obviously has the ideological and administratively competent backing of the Project 2025 crew and their ilk, and plenty of moves from the second Trump administration will be on topics that the president himself has spent less time thinking about than he does on whether to kick his ball out of the rough and into the seventh fairway.

But there will still be the grievances, because that is what his brain is made of. Some of them will emerge in the form of actual policy, executive order or otherwise; they will bear up to no particular scrutiny on consistency grounds or, often, legal ones, but they will emerge nonetheless. The wind power directive was issued on the very same day as other orders supposedly intent on “unleashing” American energy and fighting off an energy “emergency”; wind power currently supplies around 10 percent of the country’s electricity, with plenty of potential for more. There is obviously oil money behind the move, but there is also literally two decades of Trump’s hatred of “windmills,” dating to his battle over an offshore wind farm near his Scottish golf course.

As recently as Monday during his inaugural celebrations, Trump was still stewing over a theoretically ruined view in a place he rarely visits. “We’re not going to do the wind thing,” he said, according to the New York Times. “Big ugly windmills, they ruin your neighborhood.”

That gripe was just the latest in a line of literally hundreds of social media posts dating back decades. The executive order that followed it was just a more official-looking tweet, or, uh, Truth. It is a merging of social media and governance, with obviously grim results — stifling an actual American energy industry that employs hundreds of thousands of people and is actively helping reduce greenhouse gas emissions is a tad worse than the fallout from your average 2014 tweet.

The grievances that emerge instead in their original form, like that attacking the Bishop, are different in immediate legal impact but similar in purpose. In that post, Trump demanded an apology from “she and her church” — not quite a Royal Decree on par with an executive order, but when it issues forth from the Oval Office surrounded by a ruling party that has long since decided that every edict he gives becomes canon immediately, is there much difference?

The Bishop will almost certainly be facing death threats and other vitriol in the wake of Trump’s post; she and any others like her now must think twice before trying again. Wind power developers, whether the order stands or falls through various legal challenges, aren’t likely to be pounding on the doors of the interconnection queue before waiting to see how this move shakes out.

There is, of course, a chaos inherent to Grievance Governance. As was evident throughout his first term, plenty of his most spontaneous utterances require backfilled justification that ends up both laughable and legally doomed. But sometimes the justification works, and the grievance or the malformed idea at its core manages to spread outward into either the culture or the Federal Register or both. Social media gave a walking grievance his most effective dissemination technique; the presidency turns it into a Real Boy, grotesque and rickety, but walking forward into our lives nonetheless, thrashing about wildly, seeking an unachievable catharsis.