Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign is about revenge. We should be very frightened.

If and when Donald Trump runs for president in 2024, his will be a campaign devoted to revenge. Take all the ugliness, the anger, the race-baiting, the hate-mongering and the fetishization of violence that characterized his prior campaigns, and multiply them tenfold. That’s what’s in store for all of us.

Trump’s revanchist campaign will have many targets, but his greatest enemies are democracy and the rule of law itself. He made that clear this past weekend, when he took a new step in his long campaign to turn the horrific Jan. 6 insurrection into a story in which he and his supporters are the real victims.

Trump has been unwavering in justifying the insurrection and defending those who carried it out, beginning while the violence was still in progress. “We had an election that was stolen from us,” he said in a short video issued that day while the rioters were still rampaging, telling them, “We love you, you’re very special.”

But at a rally in Texas on Saturday, he went further than he has before.

“If I run and I win, we will treat those people from January 6 fairly,” he said. “And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons because they are being treated so unfairly.”

The practical implications of this pledge for the insurrectionists themselves may be small; nearly all are likely to have completed their sentences by the time Trump would take office in 2025. But the symbolic importance is enormous.

Henry Olsen: Mike Pence, this is your moment to rebuke Donald Trump

No president in history used his pardon power in as corrupt a fashion as Trump. Early on, he dangled the possibility of pardons as a message to those who helped him commit his misdeeds: Stay loyal to me, and I will make sure you are not punished for your crimes.