From Victim to Avenger: Trump’s Performance of Strategic Victimhood and the Waging of Global Trade War

Abstract

This article examines the rhetorical affordances of political claims to victimhood by US president Donald Trump during his first and second terms in office. By applying Critical Discourse Analysis to victimhood claims tactically deployed in the discursive performances of the US president, this analysis demonstrates the versatility and multi-functionality of victimhood claims as a political communication strategy in different contexts, which may account for, at least partly, the appeal of far-right populist leaders to national electorates. The analysis calls attention to a novel argumentative pattern, attested in Trump’s empowered victimhood rhetoric upon his inauguration as second-term president of the USA. This pattern consists of constructing prolonged economic injury inflicted on the nation and announcing retribution against the constructed victimizer(s). This emancipated performative style of claiming victimized nationhood is used to justify and forewarn the implementation of illiberal and coercive politics, in this case, the waging of a global trade war by the US president. Focusing on Trump as an original case study of the construction of ‘economic victimhood’ to justify aggressive economic policy, this paper aims to advance our understanding of the rhetorically complex and continuously evolving victimhood rhetoric of authoritarian populists, as well as the leverages accrued thereof, and adds to a growing body of the literature on the discursive–ideological shifts triggered by authoritarian populism.

1. Introduction

Claims to victimhood are a central organizing principle of authoritarian populist rhetoric. This is because of the range of uses to which they can be put in political communication and their interpenetration with other speech activities, like laying blame, avoiding blame, and achieving positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation, while catering to the emotional engagement of audiences. McNeill et al. (2017) emphasize the functional aspects of victimhood as a symbolic resource: “Victimhood is rhetorical, strategic and functional” (p. 8). Yet, the language and articulation of victimhood and its uses in different contexts of political communication have not been adequately explored (but see Lorenzo-Dus & Nouri, 2021; Sengul, 2021).

In this article, victimhood is examined as an overarching communicative strategy of authoritarian populist politicians, with particular reference to the rhetorical functions of Donald Trump’s performances of victimhood, as a compelling case study of the contemporary politics of pain (Chouliaraki, 2024a). It will be shown that claiming victimhood is a flexible communicative resource, which bestows leverages on the claimant in different contexts of political communication, such as public speeches and encounters with the media, social media performances, and political interviews. More specifically, this article focuses on the strategic use of victimhood by Trump as a prototypical case of authoritarian populists’ leveraging of victimhood rhetoric.

Importantly, this paper documents a novel appeal to victimhood, specifically the construction of ‘economic victimhood’ to claim prolonged financial injury inflicted on the nation and announce retribution against the constructed victimizer(s). By presenting data from Trump’s performances following his sweeping victory in the 2024 election and inauguration as second-term president of the USA, the author argues for an empowered cynical politics that is discursively enacted in the articulation of inflicted pain to the USA and retribution for the inflicted pain in the form of direct threats and warnings against other sovereign states (indicatively, Canada and Mexico) and inter-state institutions like the EU. This adapted claim to victimhood serves to legitimize the articulated entitlements, and also to threaten and forewarn the implementation of illiberal and coercive policies, in this case, the waging of a global trade war by the US president.

2. The Communication of Authoritarian Populism: Style, Strategies, and Discursive Disruption

In the last decade, an impressive wealth of scholarship has grappled with the unprecedented, post-World War II, surge of 1authoritarian populism marked by consecutive electoral successes across the globe, and focusing on the media-enabled normalization and push towards the political mainstream of far-right discursive tropes, worldviews, and ideologies (Ekström et al., 2020; Krzyżanowski & Ekström, 2022; Krzyżanowski, 2020; van Dijk, 2025). These processes have been expedited by the systematic strategies deployed in far-right populist performances and propaganda, designed to be attractive for circulation in the media (Ekström et al., 2022; Wodak, 2021).

Claiming victimhood is an aspect of the discursive logic or communicative politics underlying authoritarian populist performances. Ekström and Patrona (Ekström & Patrona, 2024, p. 63) conceptualize these performative aspects as populist ‘style(s)’, defined as sets of motivated discursive choices, which seek to achieve social and cultural resonance in their respective socio-political contexts, arguing that these choices, at least partly, account for authoritarian populists’ appeal with audiences and media allure. Populist styles encompass the linguistic/semiotic, interpersonal, and interactional choices that are part and parcel of populist rhetorical repertoires, namely, the strategies deployed in public discourse for right-wing populist communication.

Stylistic and argumentative strategies are put into effect to invoke value and moral hierarchies. In particular contexts, such as campaign rallies, the disruptive style of authoritarian populists, dislocating norms and expectations of what was recognized, until recently, as ‘appropriate’ political communication, can be claimed to have more symbolic and political capital, as it invests populist performances with overtones of candidness and authenticity (Ekström & Patrona, 2024, p. 78). Populist leaders can thus lay claim to ‘saying out loud what most people think’ (Ekström et al., 2018), addressing, not only their supporters, but also broader conservative audiences (see Ekström & Patrona, 2024, p. 84).

Wodak (2021) documents an array of strategies that have led to “shameless normalization” of far-right populist arguments, such as populist provocations and their diffusion in the media (Wodak, 2021, p. 6). This has shifted the boundaries of the ‘sayable’ in contemporary political communication (Ekström et al., 2022; Ekström & Patrona, 2024). Racist and discriminatory ideologies are increasingly naturalized through the use of uncivil language, propagation of fear for immigration as a social threat, and scapegoating of specific social groups and political opponents (see Ekström & Patrona, 2024; Krzyżanowski, 2020; Wodak, 2021).

These discursive–ideological shifts have been “enabled and reinstated in the public mindset” due to the rise in far-right populism (see Krzyżanowski et al., 2021, p. 3; Ekström & Patrona, 2024, p. 76). Krzyżanowski et al. (2023) argue that a ‘new normal’ logic is introduced into public dialogue at the backdrop of various recent crises, such as the ‘Refugee Crisis’ in Europe, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. This ‘new normal’ is “[…] a persistent, active hegemonic frame symptomatic of the initiation—and eventual normalization—of either dismantling or at least profound undermining of the core ideas of democratically-funded, inclusive community and liberal democracy” (p. 417).

Adding to a proliferating body of research on the discursive–ideological shifts set in motion by authoritarian populism (see Ekström et al., 2018; Ekström & Patrona, 2024; Krzyżanowski, 2020; Krzyżanowski & Ekström, 2022; Krzyżanowski et al., 2021; Krzyżanowski & Ledin, 2017; Wodak, 2021), this article examines Trump’s increasingly empowered performances of victimhood as a discursive resource that is put to work to legitimize discriminatory, coercive, and illiberal policy initiatives.

3. Victimhood as a Communicative Politics of Authoritarian Populists

Victimhood is recognized as a driving force in morality and politics (Gray & Kubin, 2024). Current social psychological research shows that competitive victimhood among different groups or warring factions fuels polarization by simultaneously reinforcing ingroup identification, reducing trust and empathy towards the outgroup, and also dehumanizing the outgroup (Gray & Kubin, 2024; Young & Sullivan, 2016). Claiming victimhood is also proposed as a way of escaping blame through moral typecasting. This explains why high-status groups can engage in “stigma reversal” (Killian, 1985) in conflicts with low-status groups; see, for instance, proponents of the ALL LIVES MATTER movement vs. the BLACK LIVES MATTER movement, or the claims by powerful white men that they are victims of “reverse discrimination” (Coston & Kimmel, 2012; Gray & Kubin, 2024).

Critical discourse studies have called attention to far-right populists’ weaponization of the rhetoric of the victimized people to attract voters and promote themselves as their benefactor (Chouliaraki, 2024a, 2024b), for instance, by claiming to protect ‘natives’ against ‘foreigners’ (Meijen & Vermeersch, 2024, p. 934). Indicative of this discursive positioning is Trump’s famous campaign slogan known by the acronym MAGA (‘Make America Great Again’), which implies that the American people have been deprived from their country’s greatness, while the adverb ‘again’ references the president’s promise to reinstate America to its imagined former “white, economically-robust, and socially conservative” greatness (Al-Ghazzi, 2021, p. 52).

Critical discourse research has also uncovered the use of calculated ambivalence by the populist far right in Australia to construct victimhood and reverse ‘anti-white racism’ (Sengul, 2021; see also Gardell, 2021). Likewise, five distinct discourses (on groupness, party politics, race, religion/tradition, and change) were mobilized in the online blog of an alt-right white nationalist group in the US to construct subject positions of victimhood for its existing or prospective members (Lorenzo-Dus & Nouri, 2021).

Victimhood is therefore an organizing moral claim for political debate and conflict (Gray & Kubin, 2024). The concept of victimhood is inherently paradoxical, in that it integrates opposing properties: weakness, vulnerability, and mistreatment but also strength and ability to provide moral authority and protection (Gray & Kubin, 2024, p. 82; McNeill et al., 2017). From an ethnomethodological, interactional perspective, victimization has been conceptualized in terms of the interactional and descriptive practices through which the victim status is assigned to individuals and/or groups (Holstein & Miller, 1990). Victims are seen as interactionally constituted via social actions and processes in emotionally and politically charged settings:

“…a person is “victimized” when he or she is nominated for membership in the “victim” category. Calling someone a victim organizes understandings of that person as a particular type to whom certain characteristics are attributed and orientations are taken” (Holstein & Miller, 1990, p. 106; italics in the original).

Scholars of cultural politics have engaged in a poignant critique of what they see as a contemporary resurgence of victimhood culture (Campbell & Manning, 2018; Chouliaraki, 2024a). Yet, contrary to 20th century claims to suffering in the name of the powerless, a key feature of contemporary public discourse is “the reversal of victimhood claims, so that those who speak out on the injustices they have suffered are now accused as oppressor by those in positions of power” (Cole, 2007, in Chouliaraki & Banet-Weiser, 2021, p. 4).

Calling attention to a contemporary politics of victimhood, Chouliaraki (2024a) conceptualizes victimhood not as a condition, but as a claim, and distinguishes it from the concept of vulnerability:

“victimhood is not a stable identity but a contingent and malleable speech-act, a linguistic claim to suffering that bears no necessary relationship to the structural vulnerabilities the claimant may be experiencing” (Chouliaraki, 2024a, p. 103).

Drawing upon Illouz’s (2007) description of 20th-century modernity as “emotional capitalism”, Chouliaraki capitalizes on the novel configuration of emotion, economy, and technology that has rendered victimhood hegemonic in Western politics and culture, as well as the significance of victimhood in the context of contemporary discursive struggles and culture wars. The politics of pain is part of emotional capitalism and is interwoven with the interests of the powerful, while the pain of the vulnerable (on grounds of class, race, and gender) is muted and rendered invisible in public perception. At the same time, competing claims to pain can enter the marketplace without being justified or proven true, as dominance in the marketplace is achieved by those who have access to the most resources:

Who is produced as a victim, around which claim to suffering, and within which community of belonging are thus questions of political communication that cannot be taken for granted but are precisely the stake in the critical analysis of public discourse” (Chouliaraki, 2024a, p. 29).

Victimhood is often tied to the construction of national identity and can be used as justification for policy goals, portrayed as necessary for restoring national dignity. Research on victimhood nationalism in international politics (Lerner, 2020; Xu & Zhao, 2023) shows how victimhood narratives build on perceived or real collective trauma to project grievances against constructed victimizers (other groups or nations) and legitimize aggressive foreign policy. Moreover, by constructing national identity rooted in shared suffering, right-wing populists often emphasize historical victimhood as a moral framework to justify vindictive policies and mobilize voters against minorities (Meijen & Vermeersch, 2024).

Against this backdrop, populist discourse exploits victimhood to mobilize the audience’s “moral emotions” (Turner & Stets, 2006), construct antagonistic binaries of us and them (Chouliaraki & Banet-Weiser, 2021, p. 5), and, ultimately, accrue benefit and promote political agendas.

Though not exclusive to right-wing populist discourse, victimhood is part of far-right populist strategies for assigning and evading blame. In this respect, Donald Trump’s unique mastery of populist blame games like fingerpointing villains and scapegoating is highlighted in both academic inquiry and journalistic commentary (The New York Times, 3 February 2025). Research on populist blame strategies has often focused on Trump as a principal case study, sometimes vis-à-vis the strategies of other authoritarian populist parties and leaders, like the Conservative People’s Party of Estonia (EKRE) in government (Jakobson, 2024). By analyzing Trump’s and Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s victimhood rhetoric, Hronešová and Kreiss (2024) discuss varieties of “hijacked victimhood”, typified by a role reversal between victim and victimizer. This form of victimhood enacts a new representation of moral orders and crafts narratives of the past to control the present and future with the aim of maintaining and expanding the power of dominant groups. As Chouliaraki asserts, Trump is a “quintessential example” of how victimhood is exploited to the benefit of powerful actors, whose voice is “amplified, heard and validated by many” as a result of their power and privilege (lse.ac.uk, 2025).

Proposing victimhood as an adaptable and versatile communicative resource in authoritarian populist discourse, this paper examines the communicative uses to which victimhood claims and language are put in Trump’s public performances and calls attention to their more recent adaptation in the construction of ‘economic victimhood’ to justify Trump’s announcement of global tariffs. It thus sheds light on a new and empowered performative structure for articulating victimhood, which serves a double-fold aim: to consolidate the American national identity in terms of prolonged economic victimhood, through an authoritarian populist lens, and to justify and legitimize new and aggressive economic policy goals that subvert the hitherto liberal economic order.

4. Data and Methodology

In this paper, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) was applied to investigate the tactical advantages of mobilizing ‘the victim posture’ as a strategic move in Donald Trump’s political communication. The analysis is illustrated with extracts from Trump’s uniquely “quintessential” discursive performances, as both first- and second-term president of the USA. The data corpus comprises a variety of communicative and political contexts of advancing claims to victimhood, in particular, political rallies, media encounters and presidential inauguration speeches, and social media posts by Trump published from January 2020 to April 2025.

Through qualitative, critical analysis of discourse, the research endeavor seeks to uncover the underlying power dynamics, ideologies, and societal impact of political discourses and strategies, using purposefully selected data based on their relevance to the research question. Following the discursive turn in social sciences, CDA proposes discourse as a social practice and recognizes the performativity of discourse as a means for ‘doing things’ (originating in the work of John L. Austin (Austin, 1962)), such as constructing facts, assigning blame, and presenting oneself to others. Rather than viewing victimhood as a static and invariable property of populist discourse, such political claims were examined in their actual contexts of production and reception, as both influenced by and constitutive of their broader social, political, and cultural milieu.

By focusing on the rhetorical organization of public discourse and the persuasive, and “morally significant” aspects of text and talk (Nikander, 2008, p. 413, added emphasis), CDA recognizes the critical role of discourse in influencing and “engineering” social dynamics and changing social norms (Krzyżanowski et al., 2023, pp. 427–428) with regard to power asymmetries and manipulation, as well as the legitimation and normalization (or, conversely, delegitimation), through discourse, of specific policies, worldviews, and political actors.

5. Victimhood as a Versatile Strategy in Trump’s Authoritarian Populist Discourse

This section examines the strategic uses of victimhood rhetoric by Donald Trump in narrative and non-narrative forms of discourse, as well as the leverages accrued thereof. More specifically, it will show the pervasiveness of tactically deploying the ‘victim posture’ in Trump’s performances on social media, political rallies, and interviews by focusing on his lexical encoding of enduring victimhood, and the strategic use of victimhood in narrative discourse to:

• Construct various ‘victims’ and ‘victimizers’,
• Achieve optimized self-presentation while concurrently dispelling accusations and criticism,
• Vilify and demonize political opponents and social outgroups (illegal immigrants) and, ultimately, to accrue political leverage.

5.1. The Lexical Encoding of Enduring Victimhood

First, victimhood is enacted in Trump’s rhetorical repetition of keywords and phrases as signifiers and metaphors of enduring victimhood. According to the Washington Post, in June 2018, the US president used the word ‘unfair’ in at least 69 Tweets (www.washingtonpost.com, 4 June 2018). Likewise, Trump has repeatedly used the political metaphor of a ‘witch hunt’ to label the federal investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election and, also, the legal charges brought against him in 2023–2024.

In his Republican National Convention speech (RNC) of 19 July 2024, Trump’s opponents (Democrats) are represented as unfairly pursuing him in “partisan witch hunts” (2emboldened for emphasis):

[…] If democrats want to unify our country, they should drop these partisan witch hunts, which I’ve been going through for approximately eight years […]

The same claim to victimhood underlies Trump’s use of “election interference”. In a Fox News interview to Sean Hannity in March 2023, Trump’s labels the legal accusations he was facing at the time as an orchestrated attempt by his opponents to intercept his bid for the presidency in the 2024 US elections:

[…] it’s a - new way of cheating on elections (.) it’s called election - interference (.) what they’re doing, […]

Almost four years into his first-term presidency of the USA, and despite him being a member of the US financial elite and a media celebrity, Trump has persistently portrayed himself as an outsider to the political system and a fighter for ‘the people’, who is persecuted by Washington elites, as in the following Instagram post from 18 September 2020:

More recently, in an effort to leverage the assassination attempts against him in view of the upcoming election, Trump has again played the victim card while dismissing public accusations as simply ‘fake news’. In a Michigan rally following the assassination attempt of 13 July 2024, Trump claims the following:

[…] but what they do is misinformation and disinformation, and they keep saying (.) (mocking tone of voice) he’s a threat to democracy and I’m saying what the hell did I do for democracy:: (1.0) last week I took a bullet for democracy

(crowd cheers)

Through constructed dialogue (Ekström & Patrona, 2024; Montgomery, 2020) that playfully mocks his opponents, he thus represents himself as a martyr for democracy rather than the potential tyrant-to-be that his enemies paint him as, a claim which triggers, as the extract illustrates, an enthusiastic response from his followers.

5.2. Constructing ‘Victims’ and ‘Victimizers’ Through Narrative Discourse

Victimhood conceptually integrates the dual category of ‘victims’ and ‘victimizers’. Authoritarian populists consistently represent different political and social groups and individuals in these two slots, setting them in opposition to one another. More specifically, ‘victimizers’ are typically constructed in terms of ‘the government’, socially liberal elites/the liberal Left and the associated institutional bodies, immigration/immigrants, and liberal social policies, such as those constructed as ‘open-door immigration policies’. Accordingly, ‘victims’ are uniformly constructed as the leader himself—dually portrayed as both victim and savior (Chouliaraki, 2024b; Hronešová & Kreiss, 2024), his party, and, typically, the native people.

Victimhood claims are commonly embedded in narrative discourse. They thus serve to construct grand or master narratives of victimhood, as well as narratives of victimhood and retribution, as attested in the latest post-electoral context of Trump in power. In his Republican National Convention speech (RNC) of 19 July 2024 (extracts 1–3), Trump describes the shooting at the Pennsylvania Rally, which nearly cost him his life. In the affective recounting of the events, the structural elements of narrative (Labov, 1972, p. 227) lend themselves to the construction of various ‘victims’ and ‘victimizers’, namely, targets and agents/perpetrators of pain and suffering.

In Extract 1, these opposing categories emerge in the narrative Abstract (1–2), Orientation (4–9), Complicating Action (9–12), Resolution (13–14), Evaluation and Coda (14–15):

Extract 1

In the narrative construction of political martyrdom, the emotions of pain and suffering are both directly encoded and also indirectly infiltrate Trump’s performance (‘it’s actually too painful to tell’ (4); ‘I’m not supposed to be here tonight (.) not supposed to be here’, 14–15). By contrast, negative emotions (e.g., against ‘the assassin’, 1, 14) are not encoded explicitly. They are constructed by implication only in the storyline featuring the presidential candidate as the central protagonist.

Advancing claims to victimhood in the context of emotional narrative performances allows Trump to (a) rhetorically optimize his positive self-presentation as a God-sent martyr and savior and (b) interact with his audience (Montgomery, 2020), as in the brief exchange following the narrative coda (‘I’m not supposed to be here tonight. Not supposed to be here’—‘yes, you are’, 14–18), and thus to engage them at a deeper level.

5.3. ‘The People’ as Victimized

Another prominent category of victims in Trump’s discourse is, expectedly, the American people. Trump projects himself as siding with ‘the people’, who are treated unfairly by the government. In the same speech (extract 2), Trump relays his encounter with a waitress, recreating the dialogue between them, which targets the alleged persecution, through unfair taxation, of the working class by the Biden administration (3–6):

Extract 2

Accordingly, ‘the people’ are positioned as victims of an unprecedented immigrant “invasion” (1–2) by deranged and criminal “illegal aliens” in polarizing narratives predicated on the us and them binary (‘they’re taking their criminals and they’re putting them into our country’, 6–7):

Extract 3

In sum, Trump’s claims to victimhood are articulated in tandem with and allow him to perform a set of fundamental rhetorical moves, namely, (a) optimized self-presentation as a hero and martyr, (b) heated attacks against his political opponents, and (c) vilification and demonization of his opponents and social outgroups (“illegal aliens”). He achieves this through bipolar constructions of categories of ‘victims/sufferers’ and ‘victimizers/agents of pain and suffering’.

The extract is telling of the intersection of far-right populists’ claims to victimhood with verbal aggression and incivility towards constructed outgoups (Krzyżanowski & Ledin, 2017; Krzyżanowski et al., 2021; Hansson, 2024). More importantly, the extracts show that claims to victimhood are embedded in a “politics of emotions” (Wodak, 2024; see also Humprecht et al., 2024), in particular in “the affective politics of vulnerability” (Chouliaraki, 2021). They are geared towards the affective mobilization of audiences via positive self-presentation and empathy for the sufferer, and anger and resentment for the constructed victimizer(s) (Chouliaraki, 2024a). Wodak (2024) warns against this new political logic that is increasingly normalized and is replacing rational political discourse, deliberation and policy formulation.

Constructing (real or potential) victimizers allows for the construction of threats (internal and external) and enables authoritarian populists to formulate new measures for averting and overcoming these threats (Hronešová & Kreiss, 2024; Chouliaraki, 2024a). Victimhood scholarship presents a marked gap in how the victim posture has been used as a strategy to justify economic policy. The final analytical section showcases an emancipated form of economic victimhood constructed by Trump at the outset of his second presidential term, to enable the justification and legitimation of his radical new economic policies.

6. Claiming Inflicted Pain to Announce Economic Retribution: An Empowered Post-Election Politics of Cynicism and Coercion

One of the defining properties of authoritarianism, alongside conformism and submission, is aggression and can be manifested in harsh policies centered on the idea of punishment (Ekström & Patrona 2024, p. 4). Retributive rhetoric partly enacts the aggressive component of authoritarianism, as the other side of the coin of purported victimhood.

However, in critical discourse studies, the focus on retributive rhetoric in far-right populism is scarce. Instead, studies have indicatively concentrated on forms of impoliteness, language aggression, and incivility (Feldman, 2023; Hansson, 2024; Krzyżanowski et al., 2021; Krzyżanowski, 2020; Wodak et al., 2021); offensive, degrading, and dehumanizing language in references to political opponents and religious or ethnic minorities by radical right-wing leaders in the Netherlands (Hameleers, 2023; Leezenberg, 2015) and Trump in the US (Gounari, 2018); and aggressive forms of code shifting to colloquial language or slang by the—now disintegrated—radical-right party Golden Dawn in Greece (Ekström et al., 2018).

This section will show that victimhood claims can be strategically co-articulated with retributive rhetoric that announces radical new policy measures against the constructed victimizers. More specifically, it documents a new communicative pattern surfacing at the outset of Trump’s second presidential term, which is an adaptation of the more general claim to victimhood, centering on economic harm (Hronešová & Kreiss, 2024). In this context, claims of inflicted economic injury serve to justify and legitimize the articulated threats and entitlements.

Claiming victimhood does not only afford far-right populists political leverage in pre-electoral communicative contexts. In the aftermath of Trump’s inauguration for his second presidential term in January 2025, an empowered authoritarian politics of cynicism and coercion rose to prominence and was discursively enacted in the articulation of inflicted economic pain (on the USA, its people or the president himself) and retribution for inflicted pain in the form of direct threats and warnings against other sovereign states and transnational bodies like the EU, culminating in the waging of global trade war. This newly found scheme aligns with the broader strategies of language aggression tactically mobilized by authoritarian populists to justify and put into effect discriminatory, coercive, and illiberal new policies. What is more, it resonates with Chouliaraki (2024a), who calls attention to the dangerous co-articulation of pain with cruelty in the political communication of victimhood by powerful political actors.

As early as September 2018, almost two years into his first presidential term, Trump claimed that “Canada has treated as very badly” in a press conference following his appearance at the United Nations General Assembly. Following his sweeping victory in the 2024 presidential elections, and upon his inauguration as second-term president of the USA, Trump re-energized his claims to national victimhood of the USA, allegedly, diachronically mistreated by other nations, such as Canada, Panama, and Mexico, and transnational coalitions, such as the EU. Only this time, Trump’s empowered victimhood claims are followed by another, even more emboldened speech-act, namely, retribution, articulated in policy initiatives (subsequently realized in the form of Trump’s executive orders) that both threaten and announce measures against the aforementioned sovereign states and the EU.

In this rhetorical pattern, the argumentation preceding or following the statement of retribution outlines the contents of the alleged abuse of the US to different degrees of detail. The ensuing statement of retaliatory measures is delivered in the form of a declarative speech act. In speech act theory (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969), declaratives do not merely describe reality; they change reality in the sense that they perform ritualistic or institutionalized acts, such as, for instance, “I now pronounce you man and wife” and “You are fired”. Likewise, commissives (Searle, 1969) commit the speaker to a future action and may be realized through performative verbs, such as to ‘promise, guarantee, threaten, vow’. For a declarative to be valid, it requires authority. Undoubtedly, Trump possesses the authority and institutional role—as leader of the greatest power in the Western world—to articulate policy decisions that regulate international trade.

Trump’s statements of retribution perform promises and commitments to future action, in this case, the imposition of new trade tariffs or other retributive measures. They thus signal his resolve to take immediate action against the constructed agents of harm to the US. These statements are grammatically packaged in unmitigated (categorical) modality, either in the present continuous or in a ‘(not) be going to’ construction.

More specifically, in Trump’s post-inauguration public performances, a common argumentative pattern emerges of the form:

inflicted pain + retribution

The announced retribution is predicated on the reiterated claim that “X treats us very unfairly/badly” or in the passive voice “we have been treated very unfairly/badly”, where the agent of the alleged maltreatment is always transparent in the speech co-text (through anaphoric or cataphoric references). Retribution then follows in the form of a commissive, whereby the president commits to the effect that “we’re gonna do something about it”. In between the original complaint (“X treats us very unfairly/badly”) and the commitment to retribution, Trump graphically highlights the nature of financial harm inflicted on the US by the accused agent(s).

In his Davos address in January 2025, Trump asserts that:

from the: standpoint of Ame:rica, (.) the: eh: EU treats us very very unfairly - very badly (.) eh: they have a: eh large, tax, that we - know about, and a vat tax, and it’s a very substantial one, […] so we have - you know hundreds of billions of dollars of deficits with the EU (.) and nobody’s happy with it and we’re gonna do something about it […]

In same vein, while speaking to reporters at Joint Base Andrews on 1 February 2025 (Extract 4), Trump defends his recent declarations of increased tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China through the same pattern of inflicted pain + retribution (3–4, 8, 11–12):

Extract 4

(R: reporter; T: Trump)

When asked by a reporter which country will be next on tariffs, Trump forcefully reiterates his claims to victimization by and retaliation against the European Union:

Extract 5

Note how Trump exaggerates the allegedly EU-inflicted damage to the US with intensifiers (‘rea:lly taken advantage of us/millions of ca:rs/tremendous amounts/European Union is really out of line’), syntactic repetition (‘they don’t take’), antithesis (‘they take almost nothing (.) and we take everything from them’), and hyperbolic vocabulary (‘it’s an atrocity’). The concluding utterance (‘so obviously something’s gonna take place there’, 10) comes as plausible and warranted retribution for the previously described damage.

In the same media encounter, Trump unequivocally positions the nation in the role of victim, who has selflessly aided other countries, only to be treated with ingratitude by self-serving, ruthless victimizers:

▪

‘The United States has been ripped o:ff, (1.0) by virtually every country in the world’.

▪

‘We’ve helped everybody we’ve been helping everybody for years’.

▪

‘To be honest, I don’t think they appreciate it’.

The announced retribution is then framed as a response that is fair but also necessary to restore the nation to its former glory:

▪

‘So we’re gonna change that we’re gonna change it fast’.

▪

‘We put tariffs on […] and I’m sure they’re gonna pa:y’.

▪

‘We’re gonna make America great agai:n’.

In Trump’s second inaugural address (20 January 2025), the concept of ‘reclaiming’ America’s freedom from exploitation by other nations, but also Trump’s own freedom from victimization by the previous Democratic administration, is a recurrent verbal motif:

[…] our sovereignty, (.) will be reclaimed, (1.0) our safety will be restored, (1.0) the scales of justice, will be: rebalanced, (.) the vicious, violent and unfair weaponization of the: justice department and our government (.) will end –

(audience applause)

In the same address, the verb ‘restore’ is used 6 times, and the synonymous verbs ‘bring back’ or ‘take back’ are repeated a total of 12 times, as in:

▪

“Our safety will be restored”

▪

“The American dream will soon be back and thriving like never before”

▪

“Bring back free speech to America”

▪

“And we are going to bring law and order back to our cities”

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“In recent years our nation has suffered greatly (.) but we are going to bring it back and make it great again”

These lexical choices, embedded in commissive speech acts, verbally encode the concept of reparatory or retaliatory action for the pain inflicted on the US as a nation, on its people, or on the US president himself. As the extracts show, Trump draws on a narrative form of “historical victimhood” (Al-Ghazzi, 2021; Meijen & Vermeersch, 2024) characteristic of populist discourse, which is predicated on the claim that the US and its people have long endured suffering, and, at the same time, constructs the present as a historical turning point that will bring “a promised golden age” (Al-Ghazzi, 2021).

Leveraging Pain to Perform Global Trade War

On 2 April 2025 Trump’s “liberation day” speech from the White House marked the culmination of the US president’s previous announcements with a formal declaration of retribution in the form of variable global tariffs imposed on virtually every nation in the world, an announcement that was visually highlighted with the US president’s display of an oversized chart, listing the actual tariff figure for each country.

At the start of his speech (Extract 6), the president reiterated his grievances about the US being “ripped off”, which, in his rationale, warranted the subsequent performance of global tariffs for the liberation of the US working class (2–3) from decade-old exploitation:

Extract 6

Once again, Trump draws on a war lexicon of victimhood that denotes physical violence, including sexual violence, against the US: ‘looted pillaged raped and plundered’; ‘stolen our jo:bs’; ‘foreign cheaters have ransacked our factories’; ‘foreign scavengers have torn apart…’ Concurrently, the ongoing suffering of American working men is expressively highlighted (‘they really suffered gravely, they watched in anguish’, 3–4).

The lengthy exposition of the pain inflicted on the US is then coupled with commissive speech acts to the effect that the new administration will put an end to this suffering, by bringing nemesis (Extract 7). Retribution is initially only alluded to in purposefully vague formulations (1–2), and its content is then specified with references to the retaliatory global tariffs (4–6):

Extract 7

Established media organizations have questioned and debunked Trump’s tariff claims both on economic and ethical grounds (factcheck.org, 2025; cnn.com, 2025; reuters.com, 2025). Since then, the US president has repeatedly backtracked on his tariff policies. Yet, what matters most for Trump himself and his audience of followers is the grand narrative of victimhood; the self-assured delivery of the story of half a century of pain, and the allegedly warranted—albeit delayed—retribution for the vicious exploitation of the US. In the universe of this master narrative, Trump is the resolute leader who has the courage to do what no other president has attempted before, i.e., rid the people from the injustices inflicted on them by “both friend and foe alike” (Extract 6, line 2), essentially a savior.

Prominent in this grand narrative, as in Trump’s divisive populist performances in general, is the highlighting of pain, now coupled with the punitive, zero-sum rhetoric of us vs. the world (‘they do it to us and we do it to them’, Extract 7, 5–6), which underlies the argumentative scheme of inflicted pain + retribution, enlisted to promote his new economic policy goals. The trade tariffs performed in the retribution component in effect mark the end of free trade and the liberal economic order, which the USA has championed for several decades after World War II. As the extracts illustrate, Trump’s claims to pain and retribution integrate emotional appeals over what is ultimately framed as moral economic injustice, showing that “[e]motional arousal is fueled by considerations of morality” (Turner & Stets, 2006). Combined with victimhood, retribution fuels aggressive moral emotions, such as anger and desire for vengeance for the reported acts of victimization and the constructed victimizers.

7. Discussion

Authoritarian populism exploits the relational dynamics of victimhood and enmity, as a communicative politics tactically deployed by those already powerful (Chouliaraki, 2024a). Taking a qualitative and critically informed discourse-analytic approach, this article contributes to our understanding of the authoritarian populist instrumentalization of victimhood as a political communication strategy, its discursive realizations, and the rhetorical and political leverages that victimhood claims bestow upon the claimant in various contexts.

This analysis has unveiled a novel communicative pattern of an adapted claim to victimhood that emerged in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 elections. This empowered performative structure of victimhood + retribution constructs American victimhood as a result of decade-old economic exploitation by other nations and helps consolidate a particular, populist vision of victimized nationhood, which plays into the audience’s moral emotions, thus legitimizing economic reprisal and subverting the liberal economic order, as both fair and necessary to restore a vague and temporally undefined concept of American greatness.

The emancipated argumentative pattern of claiming economic victimhood, attested in the US president’s performances of retaliatory measures against other sovereign states, can be flexibly applied across all arenas of (social and economic) policy, and serves as a stark reminder of the real-life consequences of authoritarian populists’ strategic victimhood claims, which foreshadow and serve to justify coercive and exclusionary policies. Conversely, this study offers insights into the ways in which authoritarian policy declarations are discursively embedded in strategic victimhood narratives, with the aim of appealing to and achieving legitimation with national audiences.

This study has focused on the discursive dynamics and articulation of victimhood in Trump’s political communication during his first and second terms in office. It thus adds to the critical scholarship on the contemporary politics of pain leveraged by authoritarian populism, as a salient political and cultural phenomenon, and explains claims to victimhood as a quasi-indispensable component of the political communication of far-right populism. Assuming the victim posture and voicing grievances is shown to be a particularly versatile communicative resource that allows the claimant to construct resonant (self-legitimizing and other-delegitimizing) narratives and, also, to perform and justify related acts of retribution against the constructed victimizers.

This analysis showed how the US president adapts victimhood claims to his in situ rhetorical goals by exploiting the communicative affordances of the dual category of ‘victims’ and ‘victimizers’ inherent in the concept of victimhood. Different groups and individuals are represented in these two slots, the politician himself as both victim and defiant hero, the victimized people, the government and liberal elites, journalists and the biased media, foreign nations and “criminal aliens”, and are, inevitably, set in opposition to one another. Moreover, using economic victimhood as moral ‘currency’, claims to pain and retribution leverage the prominence of aggressive affect for creating audience engagement in contemporary public discourse and serve to legitimize coercive and illiberal economic policies, in this case, the waging of a global trade war.

The adaptability and multi-functionality of strategic victimhood claims by authoritarian strongmen contribute to a pervasive sociocultural climate of reversed grievances, which may account for, but also drive, the appeal of far-right populist leaders to national electorates. Tied to the dynamics of political performance and mediation, or mediatization (Strömbäck & Esser, 2014), victimhood is increasingly normalized in public discourse and perception in the interest of powerful authoritarian actors, their agendas and policies. Appeal to victimhood is therefore part of the recent discursive–ideological shifts triggered by authoritarian populism (Krzyżanowski & Ledin, 2017; Krzyżanowski et al., 2021), including forms of language aggression, discrimination, and affective mobilization. As such, it propels populist discourse and ideology, pushing them further into the mainstream (for processes of mainstreaming, see Ekström & Patrona, 2024; Krzyżanowski et al., 2023, p. 426; Wodak, 2021).

Ekström and Patrona (2024, p. 76) warn about the dangerous intersection between populist rhetoric and authoritarian policies, a connection that is often missed or merely implied in both scholarly discussion and media reporting. This article highlights the threats to liberal democracy, coupled with shocks to international sovereignty, world trade (but also, as witnessed recently, public administration) that are discursively enacted when adapted claims to victimhood by empowered authoritarian populists integrate a retribution component. It thus serves as a reminder that authoritarian victimhood rhetoric is far from innocuous. It is much more than simple packaging, form devoid of content; rather, it both anticipates and puts to work anti-democratic, coercive, and illiberal governance and policies, once authoritarian populists are granted executive power post-electorally.