The Donald: A Yale Researcher Says Revenge Is a Drug. Here's What That Predicts About the Next Six Months.

The Donald: A Yale Researcher Says Revenge Is a Drug. Here’s What That Predicts About the Next Six Months.

The mechanism isn't anger. It's tolerance–and tolerance is why this doesn't stop on its own.

The Jack Hopkins Now Newsletter #1,022: Friday, September 11th, 2026

I’m going to tell you something about addicts that anyone who’s ever lived with one already knows in their bones.

The dose goes up.

It always goes up. It has to. That’s not a moral failure, that’s chemistry. The same amount that got you there last month…doesn’t get you there today…so you take more. And more. And…you keep taking more until something outside of you stops it…because nothing inside of you will.

Hold that thought. We’re coming back to it…and when we do…I think the next six months are going to look considerably less mysterious to you.

The Study That Took Twenty Years to Confirm

James Kimmel, Jr. is a lecturer in psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine.

Before that he spent twenty years as a litigator…which he now calls being in the business of revenge.

He didn’t come to this academically. As a teenager, after a group of local kids killed his dog and blew up his family’s mailbox…he took a loaded revolver out of his father’s nightstand…and went looking for them.

He’s written that he came close to committing a mass shooting. He’s spent his career since…trying to understand what was happening in his own head that night.

Here’s what he found.

A neuroscience study in 2004 showed that revenge activates the same region of the brain as substance use disorders. It took another twenty years of research to confirm it, and Kimmel’s conclusion is blunt: your brain on revenge looks like your brain on drugs. That’s what the scans show.

His book, The Science of Revenge, came out in May 2025. The New York Times summarized it this way: the book presents revenge-seeking as an addiction, and Trump as a probable addict in that regard.

That’s not me editorializing. Kimmel wrote the Politico piece himself…titled What the Science of Addiction Tells Us About Donald Trump. He’s the one making the claim…on the record…under his own name and his own credentials.

My job here is to show you what it predicts.

The Part That Explains Everything

Kimmel’s second finding is the one nobody wants to hear.

Perpetrators almost always see themselves as victims seeking justice.

Read it again. From vicious tweets to road rage to mass shootings to armed insurrection…the person doing the damage is…in his own mind…the one who was wronged. Nobody thinks they’re the aggressor. Everybody thinks they’re evening a score.

And here’s the kicker: it works on imagined grievances exactly as well as real ones. The brain doesn’t audit. A believed injury lights the same circuit as an actual one.

Which is why arguing with the facts…never cools anybody down. You’re not debating a conclusion. You’re interrupting a dose.

Now Look at the Record

Forget theory. Look at what’s been documented.

By April, Axios had tallied the targets: former CIA Director John Brennan and Obama-era intelligence officials. Fed chair Jerome Powell and governor Lisa Cook. Senators Schiff, Kelly and Slotkin. Representatives Swalwell, Goodlander, Crow, Houlahan and DeLuzio. Former special counsel Jack Smith. Christopher Krebs. General Mark Milley. The Southern Poverty Law Center…indicted on fraud charges.

And this line, which is the whole thing in one sentence:

No target has been convicted. The tangible product has been the punishment of the process itself; legal fees and reputational damage.

Now…apply the model.

If this were about justice…the absence of convictions would be a failure. The program would end. Instead it expands…because under the addiction frame…the conviction was never the payload. The process is the dose. The indictment. The raid. The headline. The other guy’s bad week.

That’s why it doesn’t stop when it doesn’t work. It was working the whole time. Just not at what it claimed to be doing.

Remember September 2025, when he posted at his own attorney general: “We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility... JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!” And then told reporters, out loud: “They’re guilty, they’re not guilty; we have to act fast.”

That is not the sentence of a man pursuing a case.

That’s a man…waiting on a delivery.

What the Model Predicts Between Now and November

Escalation, not restraint.

Tolerance is the engine. Whatever satisfied in April won’t satisfy in October…so…expect bigger targets…faster timelines…and less patience with anyone slow-walking it.

Staff churn.

You saw it yesterday. Joe diGenova…a Trump loyalist handed the “grand conspiracy” investigation in Florida…abruptly resigned amid reported frustrations. Expect more of that.

The people executing this have to produce something that holds up in court. The model…says the demand isn’t for something that holds up. It’s for something that lands. Those two jobs are incompatible…and the person in the chair takes the blame for the gap.

Grievance as the closing message.

In 2024 he closed by calling Democrats “the enemy from within.” That’s not a strategy choice. It’s the product being sold.

And After the Midterms–Both Ways

Here’s where most commentary gets it wrong, because people assume one outcome is the dangerous one.

If Republicans hold:

Read it as a license. Vindication is the strongest possible supply signal…and there’s no longer an election between him and whatever’s next.

If Republicans lose:

Worse, and it’s not close.

Because a loss is a fresh grievance. It’s new supply. And…a man whose brand is retribution…who has just been personally wronged by the electorate…has both the motive and…until January 2029…the machinery.

The model does not offer you a comfortable outcome. It offers you a fork where both paths escalate. That’s what addiction looks like from the outside.

The Part I Don’t Enjoy Writing

Kimmel doesn’t let my side off.

His argument is that this is a contagion. Every target and every supporter of a target feels aggrieved and wants to retaliate too. That’s the vicious cycle. That’s how it spreads.

And…he says roughly one in five people become compulsively vengeful.

So here’s his actual warning…and I’d ask you to sit with it rather than skip past it:

More people need to become savvy about how…why…and for whose benefit they are being made to feel aggrieved…and decide to stop dealing in the drug of their own destruction.

For whose benefit.

That one stings, and it’s supposed to. Somebody is making money off your outrage right now. Possibly several somebodies. There are people in this business whose entire model is keeping you at a low simmer, and they are not all on the other side.

Watch what’s coming. Name it accurately.

But don’t let anybody hand you the same drug in a different bottle and tell you it’s medicine because this time you’re the one who was wronged.

That’s exactly what the other guy thinks too.

That’s the whole problem.

#HoldFast

Back soon.

-Jack

Jack Hopkins

P.S. The single most useful sentence in Kimmel’s research isn’t about Trump at all. It’s that perpetrators almost always see themselves as victims seeking justice. Every time you’re about to argue with somebody about who started it…remember that they are running the identical program you are…with the roles reversed…and both of you are certain. That’s not a debate. That’s two people holding the same wire.

P.P.S. Kimmel nearly shot people as a teenager over a dead dog and a blown-up mailbox. He didn’t. He became a Yale researcher who spent thirty years figuring out why he wanted to. If a man can walk back from a loaded revolver in his father’s nightstand…the rest of us can probably manage to put down a phone. The neuroscience says the off-ramp exists. It just doesn’t take itself.

Sources

James Kimmel, Jr., The Science of Revenge: Understanding the World’s Deadliest Addiction — and How to Overcome It(Random House, May 2025): https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/739999/the-science-of-revenge-by-james-kimmel-jr-jd/

NPR, Michel Martin interviews Kimmel, June 3, 2025 — the 2004 study, the revolver, the Politico piece: https://www.npr.org/2025/06/03/nx-s1-5332124/yale-school-of-medicines-james-kimmel-jr-discusses-the-science-of-revenge

Kimmel’s own press page, with links to his Politico piece on Trump and the NYT interview with Thomas Edsall: https://www.jameskimmeljr.com/press

Axios, “Red-meat retribution: Trump escalates campaign against MAGA foes,” April 29, 2026 — the target list and the “punishment of the process” finding: https://www.axios.com/2026/04/29/trump-investigations-maga-red-meat

Associated Press via Fortune, on the public pressure campaign directed at the attorney general, Sept. 21, 2025: https://fortune.com/2025/09/21/trump-retribution-campaign-attorney-general-pam-bondi-letitia-james-comey

NBC News, on the expanding list of investigated political opponents and Judge Luttig’s assessment: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/growing-number-trump-political-foes-investigated-justice-department-rcna255049

Protect Democracy’s retaliatory action tracker, updated continuously: https://protectdemocracy.org/work/retaliatory-action-tracker/

Raw Story, on Joe diGenova’s resignation from the “grand conspiracy” investigation, Sept. 10, 2026: https://rawstory.com/trump-revenge-investigation