“Donald Trump as Vigilante?” by David Little

Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge, Washington, DC by G. Edward Johnson (CC BY 4.0).

At a Nashville rally in 2015, Donald Trump declared that mass shootings like one that had recently occurred at an Oregon community college would never happen if teachers were armed and able to defend themselves and their students. He went on to praise the film, Death Wish, in which the hero, Paul Kersey, becomes a vigilante dedicated to avenging a brutal attack on his wife and daughter by setting out single-handedly to rid New York streets of violent muggers. Trump likened himself to Kersey, announcing he had just acquired his own gun permit, and proceeded to lead the crowd in chanting the movie’s name over and over. Up to a point, Trump and Kersey share a common outlook. Considering what they do and don’t share and taking a closer look at the backstory behind the movie reveal the attraction as well as the danger of vigilantism.

Trump is particularly drawn to a central lesson of Death Wish, the glaring failure of existing institutions to cope with severe and persistent threats to public safety. New York in the 70s, when the film was made, was pictured as a hellscape, drowning in crime that left the police and the courts helpless. In the movie, because of Kersey’s string of mugger shootings, the New York crime rate fell sharply. Kersey’s behavior was clearly criminal since vigilantism means acting without authority to supersede the duties of legal officials. In Kersey’s case, it also involved the illegal act of hunting down and “baiting” probable offenders to attack him so lethal retaliation would seem justified. Nevertheless, the authorities, in gratitude for the reduction in crime, overlooked Kersey’s trail of extrajudicial killings and allowed him to transfer to another city a free man. The viewing public seemed to agree. Kersey’s exploits were enthusiastically applauded in theaters where the film was shown.

Trump sees the world much as Kersey does. There are wicked leaders like Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei of Iran out there who do untold harm, but, as things stand, not a lot can be done about them.  They mercilessly oppress their people and, in Iran’s case, also imperil Israel and other countries with the prospect of a nuclear threat, and they seriously disrupt the world order through proxies and other dastardly means. Yet they are able, like New York muggers in the 70s, to evade effective restraint and accountability because of the impotence of the legal system.

Trump and members of his cabinet, like Secretary of Defense Hegseth, distrust international law as providing any kind of real help. There are, to be sure, defects in the law that fuel the distrust. One is restricting the use of force among nations to nothing other than defense against an unmistakable imminent armed attack. Potential victims are thereby prevented from striking back against a future attack they perceive as highly probable and much harder to stop by the time it becomes imminent. Another defect prohibits forcible intervention in a country guilty of egregiously mistreating its citizens without UN Security Council authority, something less and less likely because of the chaotic result of the UN sanctioned Libyan intervention in 2011. 

The Trump administration does at times give grudging support to international law. It has now and again attempted to justify military action against Venezuela and Iran by appealing to self-defense, although the efforts are half-hearted or ill-considered. Venezuelan speedboats carrying drugs, many of them headed to Europe, do not qualify on anybody’s accounting as an imminent armed attack against the United States. And contending, on one day, that Iran’s nuclear capacity was “obliterated” by the Israel-U.S. air attacks in June, and then, on another, that Iran is but a few days away from possessing a world-threatening nuclear weapon is hardly a convincing argument for the immediate use of force.

Moreover, the original claim by Secretary of State Rubio that the United States would need to defend its Middle Eastern bases against probable Iranian retaliation because Israel was unalterably committed all on its own to go to war meant the United States had subcontracted control of its own sovereign national interests to another country. To be told later by the president and then Rubio himself that the claim was false signaled an administration in disarray. 

The administration’s basic attitude toward the subject is best summarized by Trump’s own bald assertion: “I don’t need international law,” and by reiterating the same point in other ways.  Even if the law were followed, he says, “he would be the arbiter when [it applies] to the United States,” and he would always reserve to himself the right to provide his own definition of it. “My own morality,” “my own mind” “is the only thing that can stop me.” Secretary Hegseth supports Trump resolutely. He describes international law in his book, War against Warriors, as effectively nonexistent since international police do not exist to enforce it, and goes on to rule it out completely, calling for “maximum lethality, not tepid legality.”

Trump’s position is only somewhat altered in regard to domestic legal constraints on the president’s authority to use force. Rather than casting doubt on the validity of the law itself as he does in an international context, Trump here invokes the Constitution to come to the same conclusion.  He holds that the office of commander-in-chief supersedes Congress’s authority to declare war, and that the War Powers Act of 1973, requiring the president to terminate military hostilities in sixty days unless Congress votes to extend them, is unconstitutional. The courts are accomplices by consistently deferring to the president on matters of national security without a convincing explanation. Uninhibited by either international or domestic law, Trump has ordered military action in Venezuela, Iran, and thought about it elsewhere on the basis of his unwavering conviction that he alone decides what is right, and that the war in Iran, for example, will end only when he feels it in his bones, as he puts it.

These utterances are strong evidence of a vigilante mentality.  Because law does not exist or is, as Paul Kersey surmised, ineffectual, it falls to self-designated heroes to take law into their own hands and act “ruthlessly,” in a favorite word of Trump and Hegseth, to eradicate evil perpetrators around the world. For vigilantes, there is nothing more to guide them than what they decide is right.

So far, the comparison of Trump with his idol, Paul Kersey, holds up well. There are, however, important differences. Kersey shared with New York legal authorities the primary objective of protecting people from criminal abuse.  By contrast, Trump, despite off-the-cuff calls for regime change and liberation, never seriously considered it his primary objective to deliver the citizens of Venezuela or Iran from extreme mistreatment. He may have entertained a hope that the Iranian people would immediately rise up against the existing government once the bombing started, but such a hope was utterly fanciful. He never endeavored to find out ahead of time how likely or what the cost might be to try to achieve such an objective by military means, and he now accepts reality, agreeing that if the Iranian public revolted it would be mercilessly slaughtered. Indeed, he and Secretary Hegseth have said often enough that under the new presidency the United States will not at any time engage in nation building or advancing democracy around the world.

Accordingly, Trump is perfectly satisfied to live indefinitely with a repressive regime in Venezuela so long as it opens its oil reserves to the U.S., and he is contemplating a similar arrangement for Cuba. Nor has he admitted much distress in face of the probability that the war in Iran has, ironically, further entrenched the regime and its malevolent rule.

Another difference concerns the consequences of vigilante action as caused, respectively, by Kersey and Trump. The Death Wish plot would not have worked and Kersey would not have been let off, nor would moviegoers have cheered, if he had gone around knocking off innocent bystanders because, say, he was a bad shot or hadn’t planned properly for his shooting sprees. Just such an untoward outcome is what is taking shape in Iran. There are, to be sure, some potential benefits. The joint effort with Israel has undoubtedly weakened Iran’s military capacity to threaten its neighbors by destroying many of its conventional weapons and ability to produce them, as well as further setting back, if not eliminating, its nuclear capability. It has also seriously degraded Iran’s political and military leadership, and decreased the power of proxies to cause trouble.    

At the same time, Trump failed to anticipate and counteract Iran’s ability to disrupt the world oil market by closing the Straits of Hormuz, and to damage significantly the production capacity of the Arab neighbors. The fact that he is now inclined to wash his hands of reopening the Straits and to dump the burden of doing so on NATO members is the result of an appalling lack of foresight and competence. That is also true of his ignoring NATO and other allies in the first place, and of his failing to grasp that Middle Eastern countries would lose faith in U.S. security guarantees because of telling damage by Iran.

What is more, realizing the objective of the Abraham Accords to strengthen ties between Israel and its neighbors is less probable because of disaffection among countries in the region caused by the rise of Israeli military dominance and its policy of massive destruction in Gaza, Iran, and Lebanon. Rather than devoting equivalent energy to making plans for accommodating the vital and legitimate interests of Palestinians, Iranians and Lebanese, Israel, egged on by the U.S., is working against those very interests and generating increasing hostility among the populations.  Finally, the devastating effects for the people of Iran and the surrounding region that could well follow from leaving an unstable, even failed, state in the wake of the war has been accounted for by either the U.S. or Israel.

As compared with a “righteous vigilante” like Paul Kersey, Donald Trump is at best a flawed example.  He does improvise a solution to real problems caused by defects in the law, such as the impermissibility of foreign action against abusive leaders, and for that he is given credit both by the abused citizens and public sentiment. But, unlike Kersey, he also causes considerable, far-reaching collateral damage for having failed to plan prudently and to guard as carefully as possible against alarming unintended consequences.

It so happens, however, that Brian Garfield, the author of the book from which the film was taken, would likely find Trump, not Kersey, the more true-to-life vigilante. According to Death Wish film series analyst Paul Talbot, Garfield was stunned by the audience reaction when he saw the film for the first time. Contrary to the movie’s message, the book, he said, is intended to portray vigilantism as a “tempting fantasy” that is actually “a problem, not a solution.” To make himself clear he went on to write a sequel in which the hero, now in Chicago, regrets his actions and devotes himself to stopping the destructive wave of vigilantism he initiated.

Garfield is on to something. Vigilantes, at least of the righteous sort, do represent a “tempting” course of action, as they set out to right wrongs that are commonly agreed upon, and they sometimes succeed. At the same time, the vigilante mind set, wholly confident as it is of its own rectitude, militates against counting the cost or considering the consequences. Most of all, it distracts from comprehending the inherent dangers of exclusive reliance on one’s own judgment. ♦

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Recommended Citation

Little , David. “Donald Trump as Vigilante?.” Canopy Forum, March 28, 2026. https://canopyforum.org/2026/03/28/donald-trump-as-vigilante/.

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