Trump Praises Perpetrators and Blames their Victims

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.

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