Playing the Victimhood Long Game
Trump knew all along that the path back to power lay through lies and grievance.
Stormy seas ahead, per Trump’s former National Economic Council Chair Larry Kudlow: “Some very smart people are telling me that the February jobs number coming out Friday could be flat, even negative,” he said on his Fox Business show yesterday. “The GDP tracker from the Atlanta Fed is showing for the first quarter a -2.5 or -2.8 percent. And we’ve had lousy numbers on things like housing and business investment. . . . We’re gonna have to suffer through some bad news.” Happy Thursday.
The Grievance Complex
by Sam Stein
Donald Trump has long insisted that his refusal to acknowledge defeat in the 2020 election is born from genuine belief that the outcome was marred by cheating, no matter that no real fraud occurred.
But a new book charting his path back to the White House confirms that another motivation was at play. Even before he sparked a riot at the capitol on January 6th, Trump calculated that he needed to foster a sense of grievance among his base if he was going to ever be president again. The best way to do that was to not just challenge the results but deliberately to build a conspiracy around them.
The book, Revenge: The Inside Story of Trump’s Return to Power by Alex Isenstadt of Axios, adds crucial new insights into those consequential weeks after Trump lost the election and before he begrudgingly left office with his future clouded with uncertainty.
In the book, Isenstadt reports on a previously unknown meeting Trump had with aides in the Oval Office exactly a month after the November election. In an excerpt shared with The Bulwark, he writes that Trump’s thoughts were already in those early post-election days on winning back power in 2024, even though he was refusing to concede 2020.
“You know why we’re doing this, right?” Isenstadt quotes Trump as saying. He goes on from there:
The words hung in the air. After weeks of loudly contesting his loss to Joe Biden, Trump had brought in aides ostensibly to talk about the millions of donor dollars flowing into his legal defense account, which would be used to bankroll the plethora of frivolous lawsuits he had launched aimed at overturning the election. But the president was steering the conversation in a direction that surprised the suits who had trekked to the Oval. . . .
Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, had taken a break from dealing with Middle East policy to make the meeting, sporting a blue and green striped tie, his hair neatly combed, a pen clasped in his hand to take notes. There was White House lawyer Eric Herschmann, who crossed his legs as he took in the proceedings, a blue-and-white printout in his hands. To Trump’s far right was political adviser Jason Miller, who was next to two other 2020 campaign veterans, Sean Dollman and Alex Cannon.
“We’re going to pursue every legal challenge we can,” the president said, stating flatly that he had won the election. He was convinced it was being stolen from him. But, he admitted, it would be tough. “If it doesn’t go our way, we’re going to come back and do this again. You understand that, right?”
Isenstadt, who is among the best-sourced Trump reporters in the country, says Trump genuinely believed that election fraud had occurred. But Isenstadt still described the comments as a “stunning declaration.” Not just because it was the first indication, even for close aides, that Trump was intent on running again—it was far from clear at the time that he would—but for what it revealed about Trump’s mindset at that moment:
For all his bluster that he had won the election, for all his declarations that he had been the victim of rampant voter fraud, for all the half-baked legal tactics he had used to try to hold on to power, Trump knew he would likely be leaving the White House on January 20. But he also knew something else: By fighting the outcome of the election, he was firing up his supporters, casting himself as the victim, and setting the stage for 2024.
Four years later, Trump’s calculation has clearly been vindicated. And though the lies about elections haven’t stopped (during Tuesday night’s address to Congress, he proclaimed that he had won “a mandate like has not been seen in many decades” despite Joe Biden’s 2020 popular vote margin having been objectively larger) the martyrdom he has relied upon since the fall of 2020 has become tougher to sustain now that he is actually president again.
Instead, Trump is seemingly adopting a new posture: that of a messiah.
“I believe that my life was saved that day in Butler for a very good reason,” he said elsewhere on Tuesday. “I was saved by God to Make America Great Again—I believe that.”
The End of the Age of Inevitability
by Andrew Egger
For six weeks, Donald Trump and Elon Musk have run a blitzkrieg against the government, not bothering to let little things like “laws” and “reason” slow them down as they hack away. But their momentum may now be slowing, as public opinion darkens against them and significant court losses start to pile up.
On Wednesday morning, the Supreme Court narrowly ruled that a lower court could compel the White House to release $2 billion in USAID funds for work already carried out. Later in the day, the quasi-judicial Merit Systems Protection Board ordered the administration to temporarily reinstate thousands of laid-off workers at the Department of Agriculture, ruling that their firings may have violated federal law.1
Elsewhere, the administration is rolling back its work voluntarily, quietly acknowledging that they moved too fast and mucked things up. We get more of these headlines every week. Nuclear safety workers, cut then reinstated. Veterans Affairs contractors, cut then reinstated. Centers for Disease Control scientists, cut then reinstated. Industrial production of nutrient-rich food for malnourished children abroad, cut then reinstated.
This week, the administration unveiled a list of 443 federal buildings to be sold, including the D.C. headquarters of the departments of Justice, Energy, Agriculture, and Housing and Urban Development, the American Red Cross building, and the Office of Personnel Management. Then it took down the list.
Those military aircraft flights to deport undocumented migrants: stopped because they were too costly. The beautiful tariffs put in place to usher in our golden age: revised to exclude key sectors.
Trump-appointed leadership at the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau ordered staff to stop all work, then—a month later—tried to clarify that they should still be doing whatever work was required by law. (We can’t do the chaos of that particular story justice here; you should read this whole thread from Politico’s Kyle Cheney.)
Meanwhile, congressional Republicans are getting squirrely, and Musk is finding himself obliged to hustle to keep them on board, per the Washington Post:
Musk told a group of Republican senators in a closed-door lunch [Wednesday] that he wanted to set up a direct line for them when they have questions about DOGE, allowing them to get a near-instant response to their concerns, senators said.
Some senators were given Musk’s phone number during Wednesday’s meeting, and the entrepreneur said he would “create a system where members of Congress can call some central group” to get problematic cuts reversed quickly, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) said.
The faster the Trump wrecking crew is moving, the more they create their own momentum—but the sloppier and more mistake-prone they are, too. Now, as the mistakes, reversals, and setbacks pile up, they are beginning to get bogged down. And they’re quickly losing their political cover too: Trump, who came into office with his best-ever approval ratings, slipped back underwater this week.
Afghanistan 2.0
by Will Selber
In the hours before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I was walking the operations center at a three-letter intelligence agency. The airmen in my command, all intelligence specialists, were chugging energy drinks to stay awake. Many of them, especially the junior enlisted, worked grueling hours to watch for possible Russian military maneuvers.
Within a few hours, we had front-row seats to the opening battles.
In my final years in the military, my airmen helped Ukraine parry blows from Putin’s forces. While I cannot comment on the nature of this support, I can say it was incredibly helpful to our Ukrainian allies. America’s intelligence community has played a pivotal role in finding and fixing Russian forces and helping our Ukrainian allies launch devastating attacks. Without America’s intelligence community, which correctly predicted the invasion, Kyiv may have fallen.
Now, President Trump has paused intelligence sharing with Ukraine. This could prove devastating. America’s intelligence support to Ukraine still helps the Ukrainians counterbalance the Russian advantages in numbers and mass. The intelligence my airmen provided saved Ukrainian lives and helped the Ukrainians degrade an American adversary.
Intelligence work is often thankless. Like intelligence offices across the government and around the world, our unit was full of junior analysts sitting at their desks, constantly monitoring every corner of the world. Most regions are pretty quiet. But of the 300 airmen in my command, the ones who supported Ukraine had the highest morale. Everyone wanted to work on the team that helped the Ukrainians.
Now I fear we are watching a slow-motion replay of Afghanistan. While Ukrainians will be the primary victims of America’s betrayal, I can’t help but think of my airmen, who will now be asked to watch what happens as we abandon another ally. Many of them also worked on the retreat from Afghanistan, and they paid a heavy mental and spiritual price for that abandonment.
Who will care for my airmen being asked to witness another American betrayal? As Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth seems poised to reduce the civilian workforce, America’s military will struggle to address the mental health issues this betrayal will cause. There will be more broken marriages and likely suicides. As with Afghanistan, when we betray our allies, we also injure ourselves.
Quick Hits
BACK WHERE THEY CAME FROM: From the Department of Cartoonishly Evil News, Reuters reports today that the Trump administration is gearing up to revoke legal status for hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees of the war with Russia:
The move, expected as soon as April, would be a stunning reversal of the welcome Ukrainians received under President Joe Biden’s administration. . . . It is part of a broader Trump administration effort to strip legal status from more than 1.8 million migrants allowed to enter the U.S. under temporary humanitarian parole programs launched under the Biden administration.
When Biden opened the door for these migrants during his term, it was for explicitly humanitarian reasons: “The Ukrainian people continue to suffer immense tragedy and loss as a result of Putin’s unprovoked and unjustified attack on their country,” former Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in 2022. But we suppose it’s too much to expect an administration that’s declared the entire concept of international aid null and void to honor such commitments.
WAX ON, WAX OFF: An anonymous Trump adviser gives the quote of the day to Politico, enthusiastically cheering the administration’s will-they-or-won’t-they approach to tariff implementation:
It’s the greatest show on Earth. We’ll put tariffs on tonight, but tomorrow we’ll tell you we may negotiate and take them off. But stay tuned, because you never know what tomorrow’s gonna bring.
This sort of thing is catnip to MAGA base voters, who enjoy imagining every zigzagging Trump ad-lib as a 4D-chess tactic laid out eight moves in advance. Unfortunately, U.S. markets tend to enjoy chaos for chaos’s sake somewhat less.
A BETTER WAY TO FIGHT BACK?: Even as Trump drags the Republican party to new daily lows, the Democratic party’s name is still mud across much of the country, and its path back to relevance in the Senate isn’t easy. Over on the site this morning, Michael Bailey and Lee Drutman ponder: What if there’s a better way for anti-MAGA forces to compete in red states?
Their suggestion: don’t run candidates as “Democrats” at all.
Just because the Democratic label is radioactive in some parts of the country doesn’t mean that majorities in those places are necessarily locked into voting for Republicans. That’s why it’s time for Democrats to step aside in out-of-reach states and districts and let a new party compete instead. Doing so would not only increase the odds of denying Republicans control of the Senate in 2026, it would also put pressure now on Republicans in Congress, whose only current challenge is a MAGA-dominant primary electorate.
Bailey and Drutman point to two 2024 Midwest Senate races to illustrate their point. In Missouri, Democrats put forward a populist-flavored Marine veteran, Lance Kunce, to challenge Sen. Josh Hawley; he outperformed Kamala Harris by just two points. In Nebraska, however, Democrats stood aside for an independent candidate, Dan Osborn, who outperformed Harris by almost 8 points.
“A winning platform might look something like this,” the authors write. “Tough on the border, moderate-to-conservative on cultural issues, but populist on economics, and most importantly, unafraid to combat the crony capitalism of the Trump-Musk axis of greed and in favor of Congress fighting back for the rule of law and accountability.” Hey, why not?
Cheap Shots
The MSPB is an independent body established in the 1970s to protect civil servants from partisan disciplinary action. Its ruling was actually a compound legal loss for Trump: MSPB Chair Cathy Harris was among the heads of government watchdog agencies Trump ordered fired last month. She sued on the grounds that federal law only permits the removal of MSPB members “for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office,” and that Trump had offered no justification for her firing on these grounds. This week, a federal judge ruled in Harris’s favor and reinstated her.
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As for the cheap shots? Never more prescient words. As for the footnote; Harris’s (MSPB) firing, just wait until it gets to the Circuit Court, apparently, they have no such qualms, when it comes to ignoring the law.
And don’t count on SCOTUS. Yesterday’s ruling of 5-4 to free US foreign aid for services already rendered? Seriously, four justices voted against honoring our legal obligations!
This SCOTUS is a bunch of traitors to the Constitution. And sadly, at least four of them can lie, and commit treason, with a straight face and impunity! IMHO…:)
The whole grievance and victimhood complex point is well laid out here. But of course it's really nothing new. We've had at least three decades to see it coming and digest it. For most of us it began with talk radio and Rush Limbaugh by the early 1990s, stoked for political gain by Newt Gingrich in the political wing and others at the same time, under the guise that "political correctness" was an enabling device on the left that endangered the well-being of the right generally and white men specifically. Ever since then grievance has been a solution in search of a problem anytime those on the right don't like the outcome of elections or policy decisions by Democrats that speak to any sense of change and evolution. It is a gift that keeps on giving, a permission structure that not only encourages the lack of empathy for others that we see from DJT on down the pecking order, but now even rejoices in it, as seen via a certain guest who is overstaying his welcome in the White House by getting up on stage and gleefully waving a chainsaw around in celebration of causing thousands of public sector workers grief and anguish by throwing them out of jobs and creating both personal and professional turmoil for those who are perceived oppressors merely by existing within the established order.
I've long since given up trying to make sense of how otherwise rational adults in daily life can become such children in their political perspectives and behavior. But such is how cults operate -- the leaders create the toxic environment and the adherents, looking for someone or something to give them guidance and hope, play follow-the-leader without assessing the consequences of the actions. It all feeds off of itself until there is nothing left to consume. We can only guess as to how low we will go as a society as long as people are conditioned to accept that and even enjoy hurting others in the name of feeling sorry for oneself and assigning blame. Hopefully sooner rather than later the adults remaining in the room can take charge again. But I'm not optimistic that relief is around the corner, not as long as those on the right tasked with leadership both enjoy the ride so much and lack the backbone to say that, at some point, enough is enough.