President Trump has always understood the value of a simple story, whether it’s one told in a 1990s tabloid, on a 2000s reality show or from behind the lectern of the White House briefing room in 2025.
In his storytelling, there is always a villain.
After a plane and a helicopter collided last week over the Potomac River in Washington, the president blamed hiring programs that promote diversity, pointing his finger at a major target of his nascent administration.
When a man killed 10 people in a New Year’s vehicle-ramming in New Orleans, Trump, before he took office, seemed to immediately blame illegal immigration, connecting the attack back to his chief political concern without waiting to see who the attacker was: a U.S.-born American.
And as the country struggles with a fentanyl crisis, Trump has laid the blame on its neighbors and threatened tariffs as the punishment.
My colleagues and I have reported a lot on Trump’s blame game. I wrote about his targeting political opponents after the California wildfires. Peter Baker recently noted how thoroughly Trump has blown up the expectation that presidents seek unity after tragedy. Today, Erica Green looked closely at the racist undercurrent of his scapegoating.
But, to some degree, there’s a piece still unexplored: Why does Trump’s finger-pointing, which has been part of his political arsenal since he announced his first presidential bid in 2015, seem so politically effective?
I put this question to Charles Zug, an assistant professor at the Truman School of Public and Government Affairs at the University of Missouri and the author of a book about demagoguery in politics. He started his answer with a pretty simple idea.
A lot of the problems that confront American politicians and government officials don’t result from the actions of a single person or of a single group, but instead from a big, impersonal system whose failures are consequential but hard to explain. Think of the plane crash, which has raised big questions about a cascade of potential safety lapses.
“Part of what demagoguery is, is the personalization of what are, in fact, highly impersonal, systemic problems,” Zug told me. Some presidents have toggled between the personalized and the systemic, he said, but Trump has focused on the former.
“Part of his success is the sort of creation of an entire fictive, rhetorical world of enemies — you know, villains and heroes — that his supporters can buy into,” Zug said.
It’s not very satisfying to tell someone that something bad happened because they were unlucky, or because the government failed to regulate something properly, or because the state failed in some process that played out in slow motion.
“If I tell you a bad thing happened to you because there was a person out there who wanted to ruin you, to take advantage of you, not only didn’t care about you but was actively invested in your destruction — one of those stories is more likely to motivate you to do something,” Zug explained. He said those who believe Trump “end up authorizing the actions of people like Trump who end up wielding the state’s power to vindicate these people’s hopes and expectations.”
Finding a common enemy
Boiling down the country’s complex problems into simple tales of good and evil is not a tactic invented by Trump. All of history’s most successful political leaders, from the left or the right, have reached for clear narratives about heroes and villains to motivate their supporters.
Consider Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who mobilized Democrats by blaming the nation’s woes on “millionaires and billionaires.”
But Trump has been uncommonly willing to use moments of tragedy and disaster for his political aims. And in the opening weeks of his presidency, he has gone further than recent predecessors in laying blame on vulnerable or underrepresented communities.
These moments become evidence for the arguments he made during the campaign — and the stories he told to assemble a winning coalitions of voters.
“Trump is building coalitions with scapegoats,” said Jason Stanley, a Yale philosophy professor and the author of “How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them,” who referred me to the work of René Girard, a French-born intellectual who has been influential for the likes of Vice President JD Vance and the investor Peter Thiel.
Girard’s theory, Stanley said, is that scapegoating “is a way of bonding people together against a common enemy and thereby creating unity between people who otherwise would be in conflict.”
It’s not just Trump himself racing to identify villains who fit into his political worldview. Last week, a transgender Black Hawk helicopter pilot posted a “proof of life” video to Facebook in response to a hailstorm of online posts that falsely blamed her for the deadly Washington air crash.
“It is insulting to the families to try to tie this to some sort of political agenda,” she said. “They don’t deserve that. I don’t deserve this.”
How we identified 8,000 missing government websites
Over the weekend, my colleague Ethan Singer reported that thousands of government websites had been taken offline, including those with information about vaccines, veterans’ care, hate crimes and scientific research. I asked Ethan to explain how he found them.
We started with a list of the most popular government websites as provided by the General Services Administration. Around 4 p.m. on Friday, I wrote a short computer program to go down the list and fetch each site’s “sitemap” — essentially a complete list of all the pages hosted on that site. (These pages are often used by search engines like Google to track what’s on the internet.)
After about an hour, I had a list of more than seven million web pages that were live as of 5 p.m., across more than 150 government sites.
After that, we just had to repeat the process and compare the new lists we got with the old ones. In all, we repeated it about 20 times. (I left it on overnight, letting it run on my laptop while a long YouTube video played so the machine wouldn’t go to sleep.)
Once it was complete, we looked through the list of pages that were on our original lists but not our most recent ones.
In the end, we found more than 8,000 removed pages across more than a dozen sites. Many of these pages seemed related to a Trump administration executive order to end programs that promote “gender ideology.” Others featured terms and phrases such as environmental justice; equity and inclusion; and pregnant people.
Read more here.
— Ethan Singer
#Scapegoating #Works #Trump
