The Case of Donald Trump and the Victim-Bully Pivot
By: Michael Austin
Tags: Abuse, Politics, Narcissism, Rhetoric, Trump

Bugs Meany brings the police and his mother to accuse Encyclopedia Brown of trying to kidnap him. From “The Case of Bugs’s Kidnapping” in Donald J. Sobel’s Encyclopedia Brown Finds the Clues (1966)

Bugs Meany was the archetypal villain of my childhood. The constant nemesis of the fifth-grade detective Encyclopedia Brown, Meany was always up to no-good. He was a thief and a liar, but more than anything else, he was a bully. A big part of most of Donald J. Sobel’s Encyclopedia Brown books consisted of Encyclopedia Brown and Sally Kimball saving the children of Idaville from Bugs’s bullying at 25 cents a case.

Donald Trump is Schroedinger’s Victim; he can be both the bully and the bullied at exactly the same time.

But Bugs was not just a bully; he was also, whenever he could manage it, a great victim. To hear him tell it, he was a humanitarian and a philanthropist whose motives were always being impugned by a smart fifth-grader and his thuggish girlfriend who were jealous of his goodness and always out to get him. Bugs’s super-villain power was the ability to pivot from bully to victim and back again in the space of a paragraph.

Bugs Meany, in other words, was a lot like Donald Trump. Just this morning, our president tweeted out two statements, both of which are part of the campaign narrative that he is trying to construct.

The first tweet is straight-up bullying. For weeks, Trump has been accusing his opponent of abusing drugs. These accusations are both baseless and unprecedented. The only evidence that Trump has offered about Biden’s so-called drug use is that he, Trump, thinks that Biden is using performance-enhancing drugs. We have absolutely no reason to give this opinion any weight, and the idea of requiring a drug test for a presidential debate is just dumb.

And the statement that “Joe Biden just announced that he will not agree to a drug test” is not even true. Biden said no such thing. He simply treated it as the ridiculous taunt it was and refused to comment.

But Trump is simply doing what he has always done, which is to make ridiculous charges against his opponents and then keep making them long enough that people begin to think of them as at least within the realm of legitimate statements. Trump would never have won the presidential nomination had he not spent months saying that President Obama was born in Kenya. He never believed such a thing, of course, and every scrap of actual evidence disproved the charge. But his constant repetition of the accusation served to legitimate it in the minds of people who really wanted to believe it — and it showed them that he was willing to enter into their political fantasy realm and pretend that it had some basis in reality.

Within minutes of making an absolutely ridiculous and baseless charge against his opponent, though, Trump managed to shift immediately into victim mode. In response to the New York Times recent story on his income-tax records, Trump laments how badly he has been treated. It’s “fake news,” it’s “not true,” “it was obtained illegally,” “they are just out to get me.” Poor Donald, no president in history has been treated as badly as he has, and we should all feel sorry for him.

It is the official position of the Trump Administration that the President can never be legitimately checked or criticized for anything. Media critics are “fake news,” Constitutional checks are “the deep state,” and fact-checking is “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” If the President of the United States has a skill, it is the mind-blowing speed with which he can toggle between relentlessly bullying his opponents and whining about how badly he is treated. Donald Trump is Schroedinger's Victim; he can be both the bully and the bullied at exactly the same time.

Anyone who has dealt with a serial abuser, or with a malignant narcissist, should be able to recognize the “victim-bully” pivot.” It is the classical movement in narcissistic abuse — the raw exercise of force to wound and humiliate a target, combined with the self-serving assertion that the target is to blame for the abuse. The victim-bully pivot comes from the core of the narcissistic worldview: if nobody in the world matters except for me, then anything I do is exactly what should be done, and anything done to me that I don’t like is inherently evil.

When malignant narcissism becomes a political philosophy, then large segments of the population are encouraged to participate in the pivot. This is how we end up with violent hate groups that see themselves as part of a persecuted group. It is how we get the tacit assertion that someone who has been a victim has the right to be a bully, and that policies designed to prevent bullying are, in fact, a form of victimization. And this results in a toxic political culture that replicates the patterns of personal abuse on the body of the state.

And even Encyclopedia Brown can’t get us out of a mess like this because his standard detecting advice no longer works. Every time the Bugs Meany tried to cause trouble and then pivot from bully to victim, Encyclopedia caught him in an outright lie. A door with the hinges on the outside won’t swing in when it is kicked; squirrels don’t ever back away from a tree; June 31 is not a real date. But catching Donald Trump in outright lies just ratchets up the claims of victimization, since fact-checking is part of the fake-news that is out to get him.

So what do we do? I don’t really know, but what I am trying to do in posts like this is break out of the framework by giving it a name — the “victim-bully pivot” — and analyzing it as a manipulative rhetorical trope, which it is, and not as a set of serious assertions, which it is not.