Donald Trump is a master of the art of scapegoating. His entire life has been marked by avoiding accountability, casting blame on others whenever failure interrupts his path to success. Over the years he has developed a small but well-used vocabulary of humiliating insults to describe the supposed stupidity, incompetence, or disloyalty of those he blames. It has served him well. Each episode of scapegoating sacrifices a victim on whom blame has been cast and restores a measure of order—at least to his public image—and opens the way to new opportunities where the cycle can be repeated.
I doubt he understands the deeper psychological, sociological, and historical importance of scapegoating as a means by which communities try to restore equilibrium when threatened by chaos—whether from disease, famine, war, or unwanted social change. Yet scapegoating has long been used to legitimate witch trials, pogroms, lynchings, and even the Nazi Holocaust. However gifted Trump may be at the practice of scapegoating, he is likely ignorant of its historical role.
Members of his administration, however, are not. Among the dozens of incompetent department heads and senior advisers, Stephen Miller and Russell Vought stand out as men who understand how the process works and how it can be used to unify a nation behind a corrupt authoritarian. They have studied how such tactics have succeeded in the past.
I suspect Trump’s childish impulsiveness, combined with their cooler and more calculated reasoning, lies behind the present confrontation with Iran. None of Trump’s most boastful campaign promises has produced the immediate results he promised. Nearly everything his administration has attempted in the past year has inflicted disruption and uncertainty on what had been a reasonably stable and economically sound nation.
His imperial posture has made him appear less like the opulent Louis XIV—whose gilded palaces he so admires—than like a cartoon version of mad King George III. As television-savvy as he is, Trump must be aware of the ridicule he attracts in the press, the lack of respect shown him by world leaders, and the destabilizing effects of many of his administration’s decisions. He knows, despite his public pronouncements, that the economy is under strain, that his brutal immigration policies have produced chaos rather than solutions, and that many of the people who formed the foundation of his voting bloc are still waiting for the better future he promised but can never deliver.
Following his lifelong pattern—this time on a global scale—Trump has identified Iran as a scapegoat he hoped could unite the nation in patriotic support for victory over a supposed mastermind of worldwide terrorism. Iran has indeed sponsored acts of terrorism, but it poses no imminent threat to world peace on the scale suggested by the administration’s rhetoric.
Trump, Vought, and Miller must be dismayed that the move has not worked. The public did not buy exaggerated claims about Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Nor has the administration been able to articulate a clear purpose, strategy, or end goal. Americans are well aware that the greatest threats to the domestic economy and to their security arise from the policies and decisions of their own government. They also recognize that former allies have little interest in rescuing Trump from the predicament his bluster has created.
This time the public has not been fooled. Indeed, many are beginning to suspect that if there is such a thing as a legitimate scapegoat, it might be Trump himself.
On that point, however, the public may also be misled. Trump and his circle represent a serious threat to the future of American society and to the nation’s place in the world, and the sooner he leaves office the better. Yet he could not have been elected—twice—if certain conditions had not already existed to make his rise possible.
I have written about those conditions before and do not intend to rehearse the entire argument again. Suffice it to say that a significant portion of the American public—typically described as the white working class—has watched the jobs that once provided a path into the middle class disappear. Their frustration has been cultivated for three decades by right-wing propaganda that directs anger toward a succession of scapegoats: “feminist radicals,” coastal elites, the highly educated, immigrants, and anyone with darker skin. The groundwork for a figure like Trump was laid long before he arrived.
When Trump leaves office those conditions will remain, and the propaganda machine will not fall silent. The public, and its responsible leaders, must therefore focus serious attention on what is required for working-class Americans to enter a middle class that cannot simply evaporate because the economic playing field has been tilted so heavily toward the ultra-wealthy.
That will not be easy. It will require confronting industrial barons and billionaires who will do everything possible to prevent reforms that threaten their privileges. Whether the country is willing to undertake that task remains an open question.