Watching Donald Trump in action, I sometimes imagine a drowning sailor desperately flailing to stay afloat. As leaks and scandals reveal the depths of his administration’s corruption and ineptitude, the president resembles a man grasping for driftwood on choppy seas, beset by the media he believes has long sought to discredit him and the “deep state” supposedly working to undermine him.



Mere days into his presidency, The New York Times reported that Trump was spending his evenings alone in his bathrobe, whipping himself into a rage as he watched cable news and tweeting angrily to his followers about the slings and arrows directed at him. The White House pushed back on the Times report. “I don’t think the president owns a bathrobe. He definitely doesn’t wear one,” press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters. Yet even as his staffers work to make him appear presidential, Trump seems to revel in playing the victim. He is, he sometimes suggests, our most helpless president, one incapable of resisting the currents in which he willingly swims.

To Trump, any unflattering media coverage is “fake news” intended to “marginalize” him. “The failing @nytimes writes total fiction concerning me. They have gotten it wrong for two years, and now are making up stories & sources!” he complained in February. “This is McCarthyism!” he exclaimed in March, while accusing Barack Obama of wiretapping the phones in Trump Tower. And as questions have mounted about his administration’s contacts with Russia, he has declared the issue a “total witch hunt.” Never before has a commander-in-chief seemed so reluctant to assert his own capacity to command.

Conservatives have, of course, long played at being powerless while walking the path to power. Whether railing against the “war on Christmas” or stirring up panic about the threat of “white genocide,” they have turned often imaginary attacks to their advantage. In his famous 1952 “Checkers speech,” Richard Nixon—then campaigning as Dwight Eisenhower’s vice presidential running mate—helped to usher in a new era of grassroots conservatism with his emotional defense against elitist “smears” that he had inappropriately used financial contributions for personal expenses. “Like so many of the young couples who might be listening to us,” Nixon intoned, he and his wife had struggled financially throughout his career. “Pat doesn’t have a mink coat,” Nixon said. “But she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat.” Most famously, of course, Nixon admitted there was one gift for which he would not apologize: the little cocker spaniel dog that his six-year-old daughter had named Checkers. “The kids, like all kids, love the dog,” Nixon said, “and I just want to say this right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we’re gonna keep it.” The speech—in which Nixon also noted that his opponent kept his wife on the congressional payroll, and lashed out at the columnists and radio commentators who, he claimed, had opposed him for years—is largely credited with salvaging Nixon’s career.

In the decades since, appropriating victimhood and marginalization has grown central to the Republican Party’s strategy. Sarah Palin routinely chastised the left—and the “lamestream media”—in 2008 for besmirching her family, even as she used them to buttress her campaign for vice president. Similarly, in 2012, Newt Gingrich surged to an unexpected victory in the South Carolina presidential primary after berating CNN’s John King for opening a GOP debate with a question about allegations that Gingrich had asked his first wife for an open marriage. “I think the destructive, vicious, negative nature of much of the news media makes it harder to govern this country, harder to attract decent people to run for public office,” Gingrich said to thunderous applause. “And I am appalled that you would begin a presidential debate on a topic like that.” With the audience firmly behind him, Gingrich continued to scold King. “I am tired of the elite media protecting Barack Obama by attacking Republicans,” he concluded.