Trump Praises Perpetrators and Blames their Victims
In Trump’s political language, empathy flows upward, blame downward — a reversal that confuses justice itself.
By Brian Daitzman
Donald Trump’s politics exalts the aggressor and scorns the harmed. It is a politics of moral inversion — one that mistakes domination for strength and grievance for truth. Such distortions do not fade when their author does; they seep into the civic bloodstream and collect their debt in time. The reckoning will come, as it always does, in hardship and disillusion, paid not by the powerful but by the people who believed them. Its arrival is certain. Only its hour is unknown.
There is a peculiar moment that repeats itself in American life now, one that feels almost ritualistic. Donald Trump speaks, the comment shocks, the shock dissipates, and something inside the collective moral sense dulls just a little more. When he called Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine “genius” and “savvy,” the horror was not just in the praise but in the inversion it signaled. An aggressor was recast as a strategist, the invaded as naïve. The grammar of right and wrong — who harmed whom, who deserves defense — was rewritten mid-sentence.
Every democracy relies on that grammar: Action and consequence, guilt and accountability, fact and repair. When it breaks, reality itself becomes negotiable. Trump did not invent this inversion, but he practices it with a fluency that has made it the central idiom of his politics.
The examples have accumulated into doctrine.
He calls those prosecuted for the January 6th insurrection “hostages,” their trials “persecution.” He has said he would “encourage Russia to do whatever the hell they want” to “delinquent” NATO allies.
He accused Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, of prolonging the war and suggested that Kyiv “should have surrendered.” He praised strongmen — from Putin to Orbán — for their toughness, then mocked democratic allies as freeloaders. In each case, the moral poles flip: the perpetrator becomes the victim, and the victim becomes the problem.
Accountability itself turns suspect. To question him is to attack “the people.” To prosecute him is to desecrate patriotism. To resist him is to betray the nation.
This is not just rhetorical opportunism; it is the architecture of moral inversion.
Every statement transfers responsibility away from the powerful and onto the already harmed. It does not matter whether the stage is Ukraine, the courthouse, or the Capitol — the motion is the same: power blameless, constraint guilty, consequence undeserved.
The repetition matters because repetition trains instinct.
Over time, inversion stops sounding strange. It becomes the rhythm of explanation, the natural pitch of grievance. A president can blame the invaded for being invaded, and his followers will nod as though hearing common sense.
He can cast indicted rioters as martyrs, and an audience will cheer as if they were veterans returning from war. The inversion seeps downward, through talk radio, cable news, local Facebook groups, county meetings. It reorders civic empathy.
Where sympathy once ran toward the harmed, it now flows toward the strong.
To show compassion for victims is to risk suspicion of weakness; to admire dominance is to perform loyalty. In such a climate, cruelty becomes a kind of credential.
There is nothing uniquely American about this maneuver.
Viktor Orbán perfected it in Hungary; Silvio Berlusconi toyed with it in Italy; dictators the world over have built power by declaring themselves persecuted by the weak. But the American iteration carries a special danger because it unfolds inside a functioning democracy, where institutions still claim neutrality and voters still believe in fairness.
The inversion corrupts those intuitions from within.
It does not replace courts with show trials or newspapers with state bulletins; it simply persuades citizens to stop trusting what they see. If the aggressor is always clever and the victim always suspect, then law becomes bias, and journalism becomes conspiracy. Truth turns partisan.
And once truth becomes partisan, the possibility of correction disappears.
That is the moment of moral collapse—a society that can no longer tell pain from performance, or harm from spectacle. The reckoning for this collapse will not arrive in a courtroom. Trump’s personal impunity is likely to persist; he has always survived the consequences he transfers to others. But moral debts are not forgiven just because they are denied. They compound. The reckoning will fall, as reckoning always does, on those least able to deflect it.
It will show up in the price of food and fuel, in the strain on local hospitals, in the erosion of trust that keeps small communities functioning.
The same voters who cheer him in the Rust Belt and the South — workers, small-town contractors, families proud of their resilience—are already paying the early installments. Tariffs and trade shocks have raised costs on the materials they use. Federal shutdowns have delayed payments, closed clinics, and starved schools.
The politics of grievance promised to make the strong feel avenged; instead it has made the loyal feel abandoned. When Trump turns accountability upside down, it is not elites who bleed first. It is those whose livelihoods depend on stability — the very people who mistake his defiance for defense.
That is the hidden symmetry of moral inversion: it punishes its believers.
By admiring aggression, citizens license it; by cheering domination, they invite its return. The border wall that never came, the factories that never reopened, the pardons that never materialized — all are artifacts of a faith that equates cruelty with control. The more he praises the violent as “hostages” or the powerful as “savvy,” the more the line between harm and justice dissolves.
And once that line dissolves, suffering itself becomes proof of loyalty. The harder life gets, the more his supporters believe they are part of something righteous. It is a moral economy that rewards loss with belonging.
The danger extends beyond Trump’s circle. Institutions built to resist this inversion begin to imitate it.
Politicians mirror his language to survive; journalists hedge to avoid backlash; judges pull their punches to preserve appearance. Gradually, the civic immune system that should fight inversion starts accommodating it. Law is no longer the measure of justice but one more weapon in the tribal contest.
Truth is valued not for its accuracy but for its allegiance.
The inversion becomes atmospheric — a background hum that erases distinctions between error and sin, deceit and belief. And yet, history suggests that grammar can be relearned. Nations have done it before, though never without pain. Germany rebuilt its conscience after 1945 by forcing truth into its schools and its streets; South Africa faced its past in public testimony; Chile and Argentina exhumed their buried dead and called them by name. Each began in the same place America now resists: by admitting what was done, who did it, and what it cost.
The civic act of naming — of describing a lie as a lie, an attack as an attack—restores moral gravity. Without that gravity, facts float, and so do loyalties.
The reckoning that approaches is not divine but civic: it will arrive in courts and classrooms, in markets and town halls, in the weary silence of those who finally tire of pretending not to know.
Every nation that has lived through moral inversion has learned the same truth in the end: when you make cruelty your compass, the road always circles back.
Whether America can bear that turn without breaking will depend on whether its citizens can still tell who harmed whom — and care enough to face it aloud.
Brian Daitzman is the Editor of The Intellectualist. Read the original article here.
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