Trump and the Age of Victim-could

First, it was a breaking-news headline. Loud bangs heard at Trump rally in Pennsylvania. Then, an explanatory update. Shots fired. Then, it was named. Assassination attempt. Sounds became actions, actions became intentions. Then, finally—but thanks to the internet, so quickly—the image: Trump being ushered off-stage by his security detail, a grimace across his face, a smack of red blood above his right ear, his fist raised in defiance. More

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First, it was a breaking-news headline. Loud bangs heard at Trump rally in Pennsylvania. Then, an explanatory update. Shots fired. Then, it was named. Assassination attempt. Sounds became actions, actions became intentions. Then, finally—but thanks to the internet, so quickly—the image: Trump being ushered off-stage by his security detail, a grimace across his face, a smack of red blood above his right ear, his fist raised in defiance.

And I know I cannot be the only one who, the second I saw that already-iconic image, the instant that pop of red hooked my gaze, thought: Oh, no. He’s definitely going to win now.

At times like these, some things bear remembering that are easily forgotten. It is not a self-evident state of affairs that a bullet grazing the side of Trump’s face—and photographic evidence of the event circulating around the globe—should necessarily deliver him an election. There is nothing intrinsic about the contrast between a ribbon of blood curling down the side of one’s cheek and their clenched, shaking fist hovering in the air that says: president. Yet, does it not feel so entirely commonsensical that Trump will be politically buoyed by this could-have-been assassination that it barely warrants explaining?

How did we get here? When were spectacles of public injury—of which the image of the Bleeding Trump will now become an historical example par excellence—instated as our primary political currency? How were questions of vulnerability—of who is most vulnerable, to whom, and why—placed at the core of public life? Why does the status of “victim” carry such undeniable political cachet?

In her recent book, Wronged: The Weaponization of Victimhood, scholar Lilie Chouliaraki explains how the strategic cultural collapse of what she calls “tactical” and “systemic” forms of suffering have emerged as the dominant cultural strategy of the Right in the 21^st Century. Her analysis shows how regressive political actors like Trump have seized upon public performances of victimhood in order to position certain publics (overwhelmingly white, heterosexual, cisgender) as unacceptably vulnerable to a variety of malevolent forces (immigration, crime, gender, feminism… the list is long). Calling these public performances of suffering “tactical” does not suggest that they are contrived or exaggerated or staged. Rather, they are tactical insomuch as they seize upon the affective force of public pain in order to hamstring any critical interrogation of what (if indeed, anything) pain may have to tell us about power. Tactical suffering maintains it as “common sense” that injury is a trace of vulnerability, and vulnerability a trace of oppression.

This, we must understand, is how a photograph of a bleeding Trump becomes an evidentiary symbol for a beleaguered, systemically oppressed MAGA base. The sight of blood carries an implicit claim to the universal (and universalizing) vulnerability of the human body: Trump, we now know, bleeds red like the rest of us. But vulnerability has a politics that extends beyond the definitional vulnerability of the body to injury and death—and Trump is not vulnerable as the rest of us are. We are not, contrary to this recent, absurd headline from The Spectator, “all MAGA.”

Trump is not vulnerable in the way that migrants are vulnerable to militarized borders. He is not vulnerable in the way that a pregnant person seeking an abortion is now vulnerable in certain states following the Dobbs decision. He is not vulnerable in the way that a transgender woman is now (even more) vulnerable to being harassed, attacked, or simply legislated out of existence. He is not even particularly vulnerable to gun violence, in a country where the gun lobby has been emboldened by Trump’s endorsements and where the majority of politically motivated shootings are perpetrated by the same white nationalists to whom he preens and dogwhistles.

He may bleed red, but in the version of America he and his movement seek to create, he will almost certainly bleed least.

Today, Trump is alive and well. What that pop of red circulating on our social media feeds and lingering on our screens signals to us on a primal level, however, is that he could be killed. It is the subjunctivity of his injury—its could be-ness and could-have-been-ness—that allows his persistent narratives of self-victimization (the blood) and his “strong man” image (the fist) to sit side-by-side in public mind, undisturbed by their apparent contradiction. This effect—by which the hypothetical comes to dominate over the actual in our public imaginations of who is most vulnerable to injury in our society—is what I have, through my own work as theorist of the relationship between violence and culture, come to describe as victimcould.

Trump is a master of victimcould. He has built a political career out of strategically weaponizing the merely possible to distract from the far more important question of what is probable, and of positioning himself and his followers as “victims” of injuries that are always, conveniently, just around the corner of history. As many have remarked, his most baffling power has always been to find ways to establish himself—a spray-tanned millionaire and television personality—as some kind of proxy for the “left behind” white, working American man. His insistence on his own vulnerability has always been in the service of cultivating and appealing to the self-perceived vulnerability of the version of the American people he purports to represent. This America, Trump insist, is vulnerable not to the present political order (capitalist, white supremacist, patriarchal), but to an emerging one (progressive, redistributive, egalitarian) that he promises to kill in its cradle.

What we’re left with is a “funhouse mirror” version of political reality (to borrow a phrase from Sarah Banet-Weiser’s Empowered) in which we are to believe that it is Trump specifically (and powerful, white men in general) who are most vulnerable to what history has in store. Most striking, however, is that we are seeing this distorted “mirror world” (to borrow another phrasing from Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger) rendered into being using the visual building blocks of the very same emerging, alternative world that Trump and his followers insist is so very dangerous.

Last year, prior to Trump’s arrest, AI-generated image-inings of his “could be” arrest went viral online. They depicted a suited Trump being swarmed and toppled by a gaggle of uniformed police officers in the middle of the street. These images called to mind the already-iconic images of vulnerable protesters being wrestled to the ground by uniformed police during the Black Lives Matter protests—a likeness that is probably far more than just aesthetic, given what we know about how AI uses existing “real” photographs to produce new “unreal” ones. In the latest “real” image of Trump sauntering offstage in Pennsylvania on Saturday, his raised fist becomes a warped spectre of a defiant Colin Kaepernick, a just-freed Nelson Mandela, a not-yet-silenced Angela Y. Davis. The whole world feels turned upside down—and Trump and his ilk are somehow to be found both at the bottom and the top.

Predictably, there has already been much chatter online about whether or not Saturday’s attempt on Trump’s life was “real” or whether it was some kind of false flag designed to augment the already-strong mythologies that frame his presidential campaign. This, too, is an example of Klein’s “doppelganger effect,” in which a climate of profound epistemic uncertainty gives those on the Left and Right alike passes to believe only that which conforms with their own worldviews and political metanarratives.

But the question of whether the this was a “real” assassination attempt—whether Trump really could have been killed on that Pennsylvania stage—is entirely the wrong question. Trump is a candidate for president, and a highly controversial one at that. He could be killed any day of the week—as could Biden. The right question is what that irreducible possibility actually means. What, if anything, does the Bleeding Trump have to tell us about the relationship between vulnerability and power—especially, when contemplated against the backdrop the real and actual and present deaths and injuries that make up the landscape of contemporary American politics?

Trump is not invulnerable, because none of us are. But the actual politics of vulnerability in America today has disturbingly well-defined contours: it routinely favors wealthy white men like Trump, and routinely victimizes people of colour, people living in poverty, women, queer and transgender communities, migrants, and many other groups that the MAGA movement has sought to vilify. Resisting the movement’s logic of victimcould means insisting upon the political primacy of the actual over the hypothetical at every turn. It demands tending to the reality of the world still with us.

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