Trump uses ‘victimcould’ to further agenda
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President Donald Trump casts himself as the victim of imagined future injustices to create a sense of ‘victimcould’ and further his agenda, a new paper from a Goldsmiths academic argues.
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In a research article published in the European Journal of Cultural Studies, Dr Kat Higgins asks how the US leader has been able to portray himself as a victim before “laying the groundwork for a new political programme that will, as a matter of legislative priority, seek to economically, politically and culturally victimize the nation’s most vulnerable citizens”.
She suggests that Trump and his allies have used cultural techniques that strategically leverage “hypothetical injury” to confuse questions of present-day social and political vulnerability, a technique Dr Higgins terms “victimcould".
Victimcould is both a representational achievement and a justificatory logic. As a representational achievement, it works similarly to simple victimhood: as a public claim to injury that accrues moral value to the claimant and animates protective, restorative and/or ameliorative practices on their behalf… The key difference, however, is that victimcould expresses this claim in a subjunctive mood
Dr Kat Higgins, Lecturer in Global Digital Politics
The open access article, From victimhood to victimcould: Hypothetical injury and the ‘criminalization’ of Donald Trump adds: “Victimcould is thus a kind of mediation that uses language and image to agitate imaginations of intolerable futures and weaponize them within the cultural politics of the present day; it invites us to imagine the world as if the things we fear could happen are, in fact, already happening.
“As a justificatory logic, then, the ultimate function of victimcould is to blur the distinction between what is probable and what is merely possible and to subjugate the former to the latter within the cultural politics of vulnerability that negotiates the legitimacy of far-right agendas.”
Drawing on concepts of vulnerability, where the far-right has coopted the injury suffered by other groups to regain a sense of power, Dr Higgins studied AI-generated images Mr Trump’s could-be arrest, which went viral more than six months before his actual arrest occurred in September 2023.
The article says: "Both sides of the illusory ‘aisle’ of US politics... sought to capitalise on Trump’s criminal and civil cases: the Democrats by harnessing the stigma of criminality and weaponising it against Trump, the MAGA Republicans by pointing to the mounting pile of charges against Trump as supporting evidence for the larger mythology of Trump as ‘victim’ of malicious and conspiratorial wielding of state power."
Dr Higgins concludes that victimcould is “one of the most efficient of this emerging repertoire of far-right cultural methods. It is also one of the ripest for resistance and disruption”.
Resisting the logic of victimcould thus requires insisting on the primacy of the actual over the hypothetical at every turn, attending (both representationally and politically) to the violences of the world still with us… It means finding ways to harness the subjunctivity of imagination not for the justification of social violence, but for the sustenance of hope.