Trump yesterday, repeating something he’s been saying for years (re: tariffs, which he said would make the US “rich’): “it’s going to stop us from being a laughingstock all over the world because we have been taken advantage of like no country has been taken advantage of.” Let’s unpack this a bit./1 - ThreadSky

larryglickman.bsky.social • 10 hours ago

Trump yesterday, repeating something he’s been saying for years (re: tariffs, which he said would make the US “rich’): “it’s going to stop us from being a laughingstock all over the world because we have been taken advantage of like no country has been taken advantage of.” Let’s unpack this a bit./1

Comments

larryglickman.bsky.social•10 hours ago

Trump has been using this language of grievance and humiliation since the 1980s, so it is not a new departure for him. But it is also a version of what I have called, “elite victimization,” in which people and collectivities with great power take on the rhetorical position of the oppressed./2

larryglickman.bsky.social•10 hours ago

Offering part of the polity—usually a part that sees itself as central to the polity and the group that should primarily entrusted with power—an emotionally resonant vision of inversion and humiliation has been central to backlash language since Reconstruction./3

larryglickman.bsky.social•10 hours ago

Andrew Johnson was a master of this language, which is why I call him the first backlasher. Like Trump, his speeches were laced with self-pity, but he also asked his white audiences to share in that sense of inversion and victimization. In an 1866 speech in St. Louis, he said the following:/4

larryglickman.bsky.social•10 hours ago

After Reconstruction ended, many white politicians and historians, and ordinary people, not just in the South, talked about white Southerners as having experienced the most torture and humiliation of any group, as if 12 years of interracial democracy was somehow worse than 250 years of slavery./5

larryglickman.bsky.social•10 hours ago

Well into the twentieth century, critics of the modern civil rights movement referred back to the Reconstruction era as “one of the most cruel and harrowing times in history” and claimed that laws promoting equality would revive the humiliation of the “tragic era.”/6

larryglickman.bsky.social•10 hours ago

A few years ago in @theatlantic.com, I wrote about how the continuing political resonance of this language./7
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/07/three-tropes-white-victimhood/619463/

pavlovsbitch.bsky.social•5 hours ago

This makes me think of the middle-aged white salesman @30 years ago, when indoor smoking bans were new, explaining how he knew exactly how The Blacks felt, now that he had to smoke outside. So Victim, Much Oppress. Tyranny was not doing exactly what he wanted regardless of its effect on others.

pavlovsbitch.bsky.social•5 hours ago

And that guy was actually, despite himself, *admitting* that racism was a thing.

Not denying it exists and simultaneously using its known features as templates for imaginary grievances.