King of DARVO
Donald Trump and his big lies
It is well-established that Donald Trump is a habitual liar. There’s no need to run through the many things he’s said that are untrue, or the long list of statements that he contradicted just days after making them. Even his most ardent supporters know that he will habitually say something, and then do something else entirely, making no effort to reconcile his words with his actions.
Because Trump’s shameless and pervasive lying was key to his election, we are now all forced to deal with these remarkably overt and offensive actions, as they now directly affect us all. We must now try to comprehend how a man could lie so comfortably even when everybody knows he is lying.
Prior to Trump, there were successful and long-careered politicians who dabbled in self-preservative double speak, truth-stretching, and empty but soothing promises. But here is our new president, with his administration full of borderline-respectable looking bootlicks, outright bullshitting us, and doing it with unnervingly smug smiles on their faces. We are rightly baffled by this obvious lying that is easily disproven.
The most common reaction I witnessed in the months after the election was backwards reeling incredulity. “Liars are supposed to GET IN TROUBLE!!1!” people collectively gasped. They waited for someone to come and slap cuffs on Trump for Lying in the First Degree.
Slowly, these people began to pick up the pieces of their shattered reality — the one in which “the truth” was valued and important — and have begun to patch together a new reality… a reality which required them to not go insane as they bravely barreled headstrong into a hurricane of maddening and unrelenting lies.
However, it’s clear that the situation has advanced considerably since the inauguration, and that we have not caught up. The content, timing, and deliberateness of Trump’s lies have shifted so that they are not so much the defensive reactions of a man convinced he’s going to lose an election embarrassingly, and more as tactical offensive and preemptory weapons.
There have been several recent articles attempting to wrap their heads around his new modus operandi; one which describes Trump’s evidently “made up claims” as “pernicious diversionary tactics.” Another, states that Trump “is a master practitioner at the politics of distraction;” and notes that he takes a page from Roy Cohn’s playbook with his “always attack, never apologize” approach. These articles are full of claims that Trump is “turning the tables” and “repurposing the attacks against him.” They get very close to the heart of the matter, yet never quite get there.
The reality is that Donald Trump — like narcissists and psychopaths everywhere — is a practitioner, a devotee, of DARVO. DARVO refers to behavior by a wrong-doer after they’ve been called out for their misdeed: “Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender.” Simply put, it means that once confronted, an abuser will vigorously deny it and claim to be the actual victim. “I know you are, but what am I?!”
In October 2016, the Stanford-educated psychologist who first identified the concept and coined the term DARVO, updated her webpage to single out Trump. I had been posting links to her work whenever/wherever I could in the six months leading up to the election, and I immediately noticed that she felt that Trump had a yuge DARVO problem. So much so that I wondered if Trump would become the Lou Gehrig of DARVO.
You’d think that there would be no way on earth this tactic could work outside of a kid’s playground; but it’s shockingly effective. In an early paper on the subject, Dr. Freyd observed that the “actual abusers threaten, bully and make a nightmare for anyone who holds them accountable;” and that their attack is “intended to chill and terrify, [and] typically includes threats of law suits.”
In his lifetime, Trump has DARVOed a lot of people — and that’s because he’s victimized a lot of people, both individually and as groups.
What should immediately leap to mind are the sexual assault allegations against Trump made by several women in the final months of the election. In response to these credible accusations, he repeatedly said “I am a victim.” Further, he opined that his candidacy was “the greatest movement in the history of our country,” and therefore, something that his enemies would want to destroy.
This was DARVO at its most basic level: an abuser telling a big, fat, ugly, blame-shifting lie. To ramp that up, Trump added the ridiculous assertion regarding the importance of his candidacy. This is the kind of grotesque, wavy-stink-lines “big lie” that Hitler himself recommended one make. Apparently the big ones are somehow easier for people to swallow than the little ones.
In other examples, he feigned victimhood and countersued the Justice Department in regards to racial housing discrimination in the ‘70’s, asserting that their original charges were “baseless” and that his corporation was “singled out.” He also claimed through his lawyer that marital rape isn’t a real thing after Ivana Trump accused him of it. Additionally, Trump responded to a series of lawsuits over his wallet-embiggening scam, Trump University, by trying to intimidate plaintiffs and even countersuing one. In another incident, when Tim O’Brien alleged that Trump wasn’t as wealthy as he claimed, Trump sued him for libel (and lost), and used the instance to advance his plans to make such lawsuits easier!
Reviewing all of these instances in which he claimed to be the true victim, it strikes one as odd, that a person who works pathologically hard at perpetuating the illusion of himself as powerful and successful, would allow himself to be constantly portrayed as a victim of all these nobodies.
Except that it apparently works! Trump has DARVOed his way into the ultimate position of power, by tapping into the latent rage of his predominantly white and mostly uneducated supporters, who feel that they, also, are the “victims” of things-n-stuff; and that their victimhood is the only thing that stands between them and the type of super-classy, lavishly gold-leafed success embodied by their hero.
If you ask them by what or whom they’ve been victimized, you’ll hear answers such as equal opportunity, Mexicans, welfare abusers, overly-strict environmental rules regarding coal-mining, and the “war on Christmas.” Amazingly, their victimhood even transcends time to include the probability of them becoming casualties of terrorist attacks perpetrated by poorly-screened Syrian refugees.
Trump is leading by example. He no longer needs any specific accusation to roll in. He instead preemptively deploys lies to deflect away from anything bad that may happen. A good offense is the best defense.
One thing about the clear garbage that Trump accuses others of is that they are very likely admissions of guilt. For instance, if Trump just randomly starts shrieking about voter fraud, he is most certainly engaged in it. Wire-tapping and being spied upon? He’s engaged in it. Fake news? He’s spreading it. Hillary Clinton should be tested for drugs? He’s on drugs. Foreign influence on our election? Check!
Dr. Freyd’s research is currently under peer review, but her webpage has this incredibly insightful nugget: “the concept of DARVO is offered as [a] potentially useful term for anticipating the behavior of perpetrators when held accountable, and for making sense of responses that may otherwise be confusing.”
Things “that may otherwise be confusing.” Like being spied on by a microwave. Or the Bowling Green Massacre. Or pathological fixation on inauguration crowd size. In each example, Trump is the victim of Obama, biased press, photography, physics…
We can expect more blame-shifting lying from Trump and his underlings in months ahead; he sees it as a tried and true technique. But also look closely at the paranoid seeming, kooky-sounding, out of left field accusations he unsolicitedly blurts out as well. Those are likely to be admissions by his ego that his id is up to the exact same bad shit.
