The president’s frequent cries about ‘unfairness’ are anchored in narcissism, irrationality and political scheming

It would be remiss to survey grievance narratives without reference to Donald Trump precisely because his grand claims of victimhood are fanciful: a Manhattan developer/self-proclaimed billionaire who made it to the White House (twice) enduring the slings and fibs every candidate must put up with, while offering up more than a few of his own.

In his race for the Republican nomination in 2015 and 2016 and in the general campaign that followed, Trump loudly and repeatedly proclaimed his victimhood. while rhetorically attacking those that disagreed with him or, worse, those that could not fight back. Recall how Trump became (politically) known for his insults to Mexican immigrants, women, the disabled, and the parents of a soldier killed in Iraq. The candidate lashed “the mainstream media,” the Republican “establishment,” primary opponent Ted Cruz, and a judge presiding over a lawsuit involving Trump University.

Trump, as it was disclosed during the election, also once bragged about sexually assaulting women — the Access Hollywood recordings. For all that, Trump routinely claimed to be the one ill-treated by others. It was he who was a victim. During the August 2015 Republican debate when then-Fox-news-anchor Megyn Kelly pressed Trump about the billionaire’s disparaging comments about the fairer sex, the would-be politician then offered up an adjective to describe Kelly’s line of questioning: “unfair.” “Kelly,” Trump asserted, “didn’t ask those questions of anybody else. … I thought it was an unfair question.” The after-debate response from a man in a metropolis not known for indulging complainers: “Megyn behaved very nasty to me.”

The charge of unfairness was one Trump would repeat often. In his business life, the developer and reality-TV-show personality drew attention to himself and emblazoned his name on skyscrapers. But in pursuit of votes, Trump’s chronic grievance was that too much attention was paid to him; he complained of being analyzed and critiqued too often, including during a CNN debate: “I thought it was very unfair that virtually the entire early portion of the debate was ‘Trump this,’ ‘Trump that,’ in order to get ratings, I guess,” groused Trump in December 2015.

In early 2016, after losing the Iowa delegate contest to Ted Cruz, Trump again leaned on a familiar crutch. In February he tweeted that coverage of his loss was “unfair.” One month later, thinking ahead to what was once considered a routine gauntlet for a candidate to run if no winner emerges early, Trump said a contested Republican convention would be “pretty unfair.” In April the billionaire claimed that another one of the few victories by Cruz, this time in Colorado, was the result of a process that was “totally unfair.” Trump even complained about Fox News, where he regularly received gentle treatment from hosts Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity.

With reference to California Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who presided over a class-action lawsuit against Trump University, Trump’s response in June 2016: “I have had horrible rulings: I have been treated very unfairly by this judge.” The same month Trump again grumbled about the media coverage of his campaign as “dishonest and unfair.” After protests erupted over police shootings of blacks that summer, Trump compared his own struggle with those of black Americans: “Even against me the system is rigged,” he told Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly. The self-professed Manhattan billionaire who bashed other American businesses for running Chinese factories then carped when the Wall Street Journal outed Trump for his China investments. Trump even complained of a rigged American election system, until he won the White House. In spring 2016, the Daily Wire ran a piece called “7 Times Donald Trump Whined Life Was Unfair.” The Washington Post produced its own tally: Eighteen.

The problem with the president’s victimhood

There is no equivalence between Trump’s chronic claim to be a victim and history’s consequential, murderous narratives. His cry of victimhood matters for a different reason: because it reflects the zeitgeist of our age and is a departure from the traditional American ethos of Harry Truman’s “the buck stops here” declaration of responsibility. However unfairly treated, previous White House occupants, from George Washington to Barack Obama, would never deign to publicly complain. That was due both to respect for the office but also to personal experiences, cultural norms, and the context of the nation at the time.

Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and George H. Bush all served in the Second World War. They saw its horrors and actual, innocent victims. To publicly complain about their peacetime treatment by scribblers or fellow politicians would be unthinkable in that historical context.

Even Richard Nixon, who lost the California gubernatorial race to Democrat Pat Brown in November 1962 and famously complained about negative coverage, avoided overindulging in blame. Even his famous self-pitying remark to the assembled media after his loss — “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, because gentlemen, this is my last press conference …” — was followed by a circumscribed complaint: “… and it will be the one in which I have welcomed the opportunity to test wits with you. I have always respected you. I have sometimes disagreed with you. But unlike some people, I’ve never cancelled a subscription to a paper, and also, I never will.”

Trump’s grievance narratives are a departure even from Nixon, to say nothing of other presidents, but they are unlikely to catch fire in a way that an ideological or racial narrative might. Personal victim narratives can only metastasize if connected to a deeper societal concern. For example, Karl Marx’s victim narrative multiplied because poverty, repression, and inequality of the sort that really was harmful was a reality for much of the world’s population. His theories to alleviate such ills and later communist calls to revolution naturally gained a hearing even if wrong in diagnosis and proposed remedies. Southerners could play off Yankees because northerners, quite properly, really did think southerners who supported slavery evil, and abolitionists in particular, worked to undermine the trade; southern whites could use such northern antipathy to shore up their own narrative of victimization. Terrorists draw on grievances in the tribe with whom they identify, even when they are supported by few in their tribe.

In contrast, Trump’s victim cries are anchored in narcissism, irrationality, and political ploys. It is not clear that he even takes his own assertions of victimization seriously. “I am the most fabulous whiner. I do whine because I want to win … I keep whining and whining until I win,” Trump told CNN in the summer of 2015.

The lapse into victim language by Trump matters for another, more critical reason: Because men and women are remarkably adept in slithering away from responsibility for their own choices and the consequences for the same. The problem with Trump’s self-referencing grievance language, beyond its corrosive example and thus effect on respect for the office, is that just as the public and the western world need leaders to counter the self-indulgent, ill-advised, and over-the-top claims of victimization embedded in popular culture, politics, and academia, the American president reinforces the victim culture and its first impulse: Others are to blame for my imperfect world.

Excerpted from The Victim Cult: How the Grievance Culture is Wrecking Civilization, by Mark Milke, published by the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy. Photo: WikiCommons.