Donald Trump’s fixation on the “big lie” of the 2020 election is the organizing principle of his political life. After the Jan. 6 insurrection, he campaigned against Republicans who dared to hold him accountable. Since returning to office, he has set out on a revenge tour so obsessive and self-defeating that it is now consuming the very people who carried him back to power.
From the start of his second term, the president has used the levers of government to reward loyalty and punish perceived betrayal. Universities that failed his ideological loyalty tests were threatened with investigations or funding cuts. Media companies were sued and harassed. Law firms that represented his opponents were singled out for retribution.
Instead, the president has turned his weapons of revenge on deep-red communities and MAGA diehards who believed — despite mountains of evidence to the contrary — that their loyalty would shield them.
As Salon’s Brian Karem recently observed, there is no indication that Trump plans to slow down in 2026. Instead, the president has turned his weapons of revenge on deep-red communities and MAGA diehards who believed — despite mountains of evidence to the contrary — that their loyalty would shield them. With the first veto of his second term, he is gleefully punishing tens of thousands of his own voters now that he doesn’t need them anymore for personal gain.
On Tuesday, Trump rejected bipartisan legislation to complete the Arkansas Valley Conduit, a 130-mile pipeline designed to bring clean drinking water to farms and homes across southeastern Colorado — an area that voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2024. Groundwater in these communities is contaminated with salt and naturally occurring radioactive elements. The bill would have shifted more of the cost of completing the project — which has been in the works since the 1960s — onto the federal government, relieving the region’s poor, rural communities of a crushing financial burden. It passed Congress unanimously, but Trump killed it anyway.
In a message posted to Truth Social the same day, the president made clear that the veto was not about policy, as the White House’s official statement about “massive cost of taxpayer handouts” suggested, but a personal vendetta on behalf of “Tina Peters, who is now, for two years out of nine, sitting in a Colorado Maximum Security Prison, at the age of 73, and sick, for the ‘crime’ of trying to stop the massive voter fraud that goes on in her State.”
Peters, a Republican election official from a deep-red county, was charged by a Republican district attorney and convicted by a jury in 2024 — that almost certainly included Republicans — of tampering with voting machines in an effort to support Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen. Her crime was not courageously “catching Democrats cheating,” as Trump insists, but orchestrating a breach of her county’s election system and handing access to votes and voter data to an associate of election conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell. At her sentencing, Peters repeatedly insulted the judge and never showed an ounce of contrition.
Trump, for his part, begged Colorado to move her to a federal jail. The state said no. He issued a full and unconditional pardon that, because her crimes were at the state level, had no legal effect, and so he threatened “harsh measures” if she was not released.
The week before his veto, Trump denied Colorado’s request for federal disaster funding to help rural counties in southwestern Colorado recover from recent wildfires and record-breaking flooding. Rio Blanco County, which voted 81% for Trump in 2024, was left scrambling to rebuild power lines after more than $20 million in damage.
Now one of Trump’s loudest loyalists is pushing back.
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Rep. Lauren Boebert shrugged as Trump’s administration went after Colorado in other ways, including dismantling the National Center for Atmospheric Research in liberal Boulder, telling reporters that “if he wants to go after Boulder and some climate activists, sure.” But since the congresswoman sponsored the Finish the Arkansas Valley Conduit Act, the president’s latest dose of vengeance is a problem. “I must have missed the rally where he stood in Colorado and promised to personally derail critical water infrastructure projects,” Boebert said after Trump’s veto. “I sincerely hope this veto has nothing to do with political retribution.”
Boebert, who is infamous for engaging in a lewd act in a theater full of children, was one of four initial Republican rebels who joined Democrats in forcing the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files. (The group also included Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, whom Trump has called a “lunatic” and a “traitor.”) As the president worked to bully the rebels into submission, his top aides even called Boebert into the White House Situation Room. But Trump’s strong-arm tactics reportedly caused Boebert to dig in. Now her constituents are paying the price. “This isn’t over,” she vowed.
MAGA has always promised its followers protection in exchange for obedience. What Trump is demonstrating now is that the protection was an illusion. Loyalty to him is a leash, and he will not hesitate to choke off even his most devoted supporters.
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Republicans in Congress now face a test they have spent nearly a decade avoiding. Since the Arkansas Valley Conduit bill passed the House and Senate unanimously, overriding the president’s veto should be easy. The question is whether Republicans will be willing to risk Trump’s wrath to deliver clean water to their own voters. History suggests they will hesitate before eventually caving to his will. Fear has become the GOP’s driving ideology.
What this means is that MAGA voters are learning, in real time, what the rest of the country has known for over a decade. There are only two kinds of people in Trump’s orbit: those who have been burned, and those who will be. What makes this moment different is that the consequences are no longer confined to the political careers of Republicans. The president’s revenge now looks like burned power lines left unrepaired, flood damage left unaddressed and clean water denied to his own voters.
For years, Trump’s supporters told themselves they would be the exception. They excused his cruelty as a solid strategy, his corruption as shrewdness and his lies as necessary to combat imagined enemies. Now the leopard is licking their faces, and they are bewildered.
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