Jussie Smollett, Roger Stone, Donald Trump and the politics of victimhood

As you’ve probably heard, a well-known public figure got in hot water last week by portraying himself as the victim of a vicious attack, hoping to capitalize on public sympathy to advance his career.

I’m talking, of course, about Roger Stone.

Yes, Roger Stone — the flamboyant Republican operative who got his start in politics doing dirty tricks for Richard Nixon, the spinner of right-wing conspiracy theories about every Democratic president since Lyndon Johnson, the longtime friend and adviser to Donald Trump — wants a piece of the victim action that was also mined recently, we’re told, by actor Jussie Smollett.

Chicago police say Smollett claimed to be the victim of a racist and homophobic attack by two “MAGA”-chanting strangers in January, but last week they arrested him and charged him with filing a false report. They said he orchestrated an attack and paid two men to carry it out.

Why would anyone do such a thing? According to police, he was unhappy with his salary for his role on the television series “Empire,” and making himself the object of a national outpouring of sympathy from everyone from President Trump to Katy Perry was his novel way of asking for a raise.

Conservatives, including White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders, seized on Smollett’s arrest to turn the tables on “Nancy Pelosi, Cory Booker and a number of others — mostly those that are running for president — that quickly came out, attacked the president, blamed the president” for the behavior of his apparently imaginary supporters. That was the subject of a billion or so Twitter posts. But while Pelosi condemned the attack when it was first reported, in a tweet that has now been deleted, and Booker and Sen. Kamala Harris both called it a “modern-day lynching,” Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., appears to be the only nationally prominent Democrat who specifically blamed Trump for creating a political climate that inspires hate crimes.

But it says something about contemporary American culture that victimhood is seen as a shortcut to getting ahead in the world, even for someone who already would seem to have things pretty good.

Like Stone, who was indicted and arrested last month on charges involving allegations of lying to Congress over his role in promoting the dissemination of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee. He has maintained his innocence, as is his right, but also described the charges, in social media posts and emails soliciting contributions to pay his lawyers, as an “attack” and an “assault” by “hitman Robert Mueller,” the special counsel who indicted him.

Poor Roger! Under assault by a hitman! Defending yourself against a federal indictment is extremely expensive, of course, although Stone ran up the cost by posting on social media a photo of the judge overseeing his case alongside a symbol that looked to observers like crosshairs. That led the highly unamused Judge Amy Berman Jackson to call Stone in for a tongue-lashing, at which he was represented by no fewer than four lawyers, the same number as were there on behalf of the United States of America. (Three of them are based in Stone’s home state of Florida and presumably flew up to Washington for the occasion on what are known in the legal profession as “billable hours.”) The hearing resulted in a broad order forbidding Stone to write or say anything about the case except to deny his guilt, or shake down the public for money to help get him out of the mess he made for himself.

Who says famous, well-connected bespoke-tailored white men can’t be victims too? In his abject appearance before Jackson, Stone waxed eloquent on the toll the case is taking on him and his family. His consulting business, from which he once earned $47,000 a month, is now “virtually nonexistent,” he claimed. He’s “having trouble putting food on the table and paying the rent” — $9,500 a month, according to the local newspaper — with the pittance he can scrape together from “speaking, writing, book sales and speeches.” (On the same day that he posted the picture of Jackson on Instagram, he republished his 2017 book “The Making of the President 2016: How Donald Trump Orchestrated a Revolution” under a new title, “The Myth of Russian Collusion.”) The psychological toll of his ordeal — “I now have television commentators talking about the likelihood that I will be raped in prison if I am convicted,” he said woefully — has left him “being treated for emotional stress,” a mere shadow of the “handsome bodybuilder” he was in 1996, when he posted an ad seeking sexual partners for himself and his “hot insatiable” wife.

I bring this up only partly because Stone is one of the most contemptible political figures of the last half-century, someone who was not above getting rich by peddling the conspiracy that Lyndon Johnson was behind the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. My larger point is that the politics of victimhood, which were apparently very much on display in the lamentable Jussie Smollett affair, are not confined to racial minorities, gays or the left, Tucker Carlson notwithstanding. It is a foundational belief of the conservative movement that they represent an oppressed minority under siege by an overwhelmingly liberal establishment in academia and the media — going back at least to the civil rights era, when white Southerners would indignantly complain that the national press was fixated on lynchings and only reported the downside of segregation. It has continued through successive Republican presidencies and Republican-led Congresses, down to the present day in such forms as the preposterous annual Fox News charade of a “war on Christmas.”

And, of course, there is the prime example of Stone’s friend, the victim-in-chief Donald Trump, who has pulled off the formidable trick of asserting incredible success in every aspect of his life, business and presidency, while simultaneously claiming to be an underdog beset by rogue prosecutors, vindictive Democrats, mendacious journalists and underhanded foreign governments. In his personal mythology, the odds are always stacked against him; the world is forever being “unfair” — not to the poor or minorities or to the population of countries that are actually being invaded, but to him and to the United States, threatened by caravans of impoverished women and children from Guatemala.

Among the things he has called “unfair” on Twitter are “Saturday Night Live,” Robert Mueller, Chuck Schumer, birthright citizenship, the treatment of his Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, the trade and border policies of China, Mexico and Canada, and media reports that his wife, Melania, had plastic surgery.

This reflects a deep character flaw on the part of Trump. But it is also an indictment of American culture that we encourage this habit of seeking vindication in victimhood, on both sides of the political divide. After 30 years, Al Sharpton has not publicly retracted or apologized for making public accusations of rape and racist assault against specific, named individuals on the allegation of a teenage girl who has been conclusively proved to have made the incident up.

The ambiguous standoff between a white high school student and a Native American activist last month gave rise to a brief frenzy of finger-pointing in which the media mostly joined, bestowing the cherished mantle of victimhood on first one side and then the other. There are, let us acknowledge, enough real victims in the world that we don’t have to waste our sympathy on made-up ones.

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