Time after time, with predictable regularity, never missing a beat, Donald Trump proclaims his innocence. He always denies that he has done anything wrong. The charge does not matter. He is blameless. But this is only the beginning of the pattern. Then, he attacks his accusers, or anyone involved in bringing him to account, usually of committing the identical offense of which he stands accused.
But it is not enough for him to lash out. Then, he declares himself to be the victim. Whatever it is, he is falsely accused. But his self-dramatization as the wounded sufferer is only half his story: he insists that whoever has accused him is in fact the offender. He emerges triumphant, the martyr, the truth-teller, courageously unmasking the real villain. J’accuse!
Trump’s pattern is textbook manipulation – literally. It has a precise name given to it after decades of academic research. Jennifer Freyd, now professor emerita of psychology at the University of Oregon, developed the theory over her career studying sexual assault, trauma and institutional betrayal. She named the process by which the perpetrator seeks to avoid accountability Darvo – a strategy with the elements of denial, attack, and reversal of victim and offender.
“I named the idea in the 1990s,” Freyd told me. “People can deny an accusation without resorting to Darvo. Why not just say, ‘I’m disturbed by what you’re saying, it doesn’t comport with what I remember, these are important issues, I want to understand.’ You can stick to a firm denial without being a victim. But the viciousness of the attack is intended to be silencing.”
Freyd observes: “The people who use Darvo are different from the people who don’t … It’s a red flag.”
Trump’s behavior in the E Jean Carroll case has been a classic exhibit. The defamation case was brought after Trump said she was “totally lying”, explaining that “she’s not my type”, about her description of his sexual assault of her in a book and a New York magazine article. He issued a formal statement from the White House on 19 July 2019: “If anyone has information that the Democratic Party is working with Ms Carroll or New York magazine, please notify us as soon as possible. The world should know what’s really going on. It is a disgrace, and people should pay dearly for such false accusations.”
All the elements of Darvo, his familiar pattern, were present in his deflection. He denied the incident occurred: “I’ve never met this person in my life.” He attacked her: “Shame on those who make up false stories of assault to try to get publicity for themselves or sell a book or carry out a political agenda.” And he turned the tables to make himself the victim and her the aggressor deserving of punishment: “People should pay dearly for such false accusations.”
In the first defamation trial in 2023, Judge Lewis Kaplan declared that based on the jury’s deliberations Trump had defamed her and committed rape. “… Mr Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape’,” he stated. “Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr Trump in fact did exactly that.”
The jury awarded Carroll $5m. Trump appeared on CNN the day after the judgment to call the decision “fake news” and her a “whack job”. She amended her defamation lawsuit.
During the second trial, Trump inevitably repeated this pattern. First, he denied the accusation. “She said that I did something to her that never took place,” he testified in a deposition. “There was no anything.” Then, he attacked her: “I know nothing about this nutjob.” Then, he made himself her victim: “She’s accusing me of rape, a woman that I have no idea who she is.” Then, he called her “sick, mentally sick” and labeled her attorney Roberta Kaplan “a political operative”. They had connived for ulterior motives to hurt him.
Then, he lied about an interview she had given, to claim that – even if he never knew her and the event never took place – she said she enjoyed being sexually assaulted by him. “She actually indicated that she loved it. Okay? She loved it until commercial break,” Trump said. “In fact, I think she said it was sexy, didn’t she? She said it was very sexy to be raped. Didn’t she say that?”
In the second defamation trial, the jury delivered a judgment of $83.3m in damages against Trump.
There’s a method to Trump’s madness. The madness is the method – and the method is the madness. It’s more than his malignant narcissism. It’s more than his relentless lying. Conscious or unconscious, it is his invariable reflexive response to the danger of being held responsible for his misdeeds and crimes. Its roots lie in the model of his brutish father. Upon that foundation he added the vicious counsel of Roy Cohn to attack anyone suing him in order to raise the personal cost for his victims, drain them of resources and delay the courts.
But Trump’s instinctive reliance on Darvo goes beyond the mean-spirited tactics he learned from Cohn. Those lessons settled long ago into his pathology, becoming something more pervasive, systematic and fundamental, defining Trump’s behavior in every area of his life. The pattern is written all over Trump’s rap sheet of adjudicated and alleged sexual violence. Dozens of women have come forward by name to accuse him of assault and rape. His malicious insults of women are legion.
He responds to all of his accusers using the Darvo playbook. “Every woman lied when they came forward to hurt my campaign,” he said in 2016. “Total fabrication. The events never happened. Never. All of these liars will be sued after the election is over.” Again, he was the victim, they were the aggressors. He threatened them in order to silence them.
Though Trump ranks among the greatest living specimens of misogyny, his Darvo blame-casting extends to foes of any gender in every one of his conflicts. Trump’s syndrome has become the core of his politics. Just as he is the Maga icon, even exalted as a god, his derangement is the golden calf for his followers. They worship by imitation. His gaslighting about his sexual violence has morphed into the essence of his pseudo-ideology of a debauched party.
The Trump Republicans, apologizing for him, twist their arguments into the Darvo template. In the Republican-dominated House of Representatives, the weaponization committee has institutionalized a warped Darvo construct in its projections on the cave wall of conspiracies and enemies. One day, the FBI is the culprit victimizing Trump; the next, Taylor Swift.
In case after case, Trump applies the blueprint. His closing statement at his New York fraud trial on 12 January was definitive in his application of the complete features of Darvo. He raced back and forth from denial, to attack, to reversal of victim and offender. “This is a political witch-hunt that was set aside by – should be set aside. We should receive damages for what we’ve gone through, for what they’ve taken this company through.” He was the victim.
The one bringing the case, Letitia James, the New York attorney general, was the assailant. “We have a situation where I’m an innocent man,” Trump said. “I’ve been persecuted by somebody running for office … they want to make sure that I don’t win again, that this is partially election interference. But, in particular, the person in the room right now hates Trump and uses Trump to get elected.”
Trump, on trial for financial fraud, flipped the narrative. “This is no fraud. This is a fraud on me.” Then, he baited Judge Arthur Engoron. “I know this is boring you.”
“One minute, Mr Trump,” said the judge.
“You can’t listen for more than one minute,” Trump shot back. “This has been a persecution of somebody that’s done a good job in New York.”
“Please control your client,” the judge told Trump’s lawyer.
“Your Honor, look, I did nothing wrong,” said Trump. “They should pay me for what we had to go through.”
Trump’s harangue in the Manhattan courtroom was just the latest variation on his themes. After the FBI seized boxes of classified documents, including national security secrets, that Trump took to Mar-a-Lago, for which he has been charged with 41 felonies, Trump let loose on 8 August 2022 with a vehement Darvo defense. His “beautiful home” was “under siege” from “FBI agents”, in “an attack from Radical Left Democrats”.
Never describing the reason for the seizure of documents, he literally spelled out his technique of sleight-of-hand reversal. “What is the difference between this and Watergate, where operatives broke into the Democrat National Committee? Here, in reverse, Democrats broke into the home of the 45th President of the United States.”
This outrage, according to Trump, was the culmination of his mistreatment – at least until the next one. “The political persecution of President Donald J Trump has been going on for years,” he said, speaking of himself in the third person, “with the now fully debunked Russia, Russia, Russia Scam, Impeachment Hoax No 1, Impeachment Hoax No 2, and so much more, it just never ends. It is political targeting at the highest level!” Then, he attacked Hillary Clinton. “Absolutely nothing has happened to hold her accountable.”
Trump’s language in his Darvo screed about the documents he had secreted at Mar-a-Lago was a replica of his most historic speech. In his rant on 6 January 2021 to the assembled mob ready to march on the Capitol, he presented himself as the victim in almost exactly the same words.
“All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by emboldened radical-left Democrats, which is what they’re doing. And stolen by the fake news media … You don’t concede when there’s theft involved … We will stop the steal.”
He turned Mike Pence, his vice-president, into an enemy, mentioning his name seven times. The gallows were already being constructed in front of the Capitol, yet Trump and his mob were the ones being intimidated and silenced. “We will not let them silence your voices.” The media was “the enemy of the people”.
In the midst of his recital of the “pure theft” of the election, he managed to find a way to insert a graceless note of misogyny, exactly as he would after the Mar-a-Lago seizure, a non sequitur explicable by the perverse logic of Darvo. “And the only unhappy person in the United States, single most unhappy, is Hillary Clinton.” Then, he told the mob to go “fight” at the Capitol.
“Darvo works,” Freyd told me. “There are two ways it works. One is on the victim, who is attacked. Darvo leads to self-blame, which leads to self-silencing. It’s effective in that it increases power over the victim. The other way is that it damages the credibility of the victim. When we introduce Darvo into the experiment, for the participant who doesn’t know about it, blame is reduced on the perpetrator. Darvo hurts the victim more. It tarnishes more the person who is the target of Darvo.”
But Freyd also says that her research shows that when people are made aware of the nature of Darvo beforehand, it has a diminished effect. “The one hope is that when they know about it, they are less susceptible to it as a defense.” She concludes: “It would make a difference to identify the strategy and call it out. Normalizing Darvo is colluding and harmful.”
Trump’s campaign themes largely consist of his defenses, which are adaptations of Darvo. He denies all the accusations. A majority of Republicans believe he is falsely charged. He attacks a host of enemies from E Jean Carroll to Jack Smith, from the judges to their clerks. He is the victim. They are the offenders. Darvo is his shield of innocence.
“Are you thinking of trying to use campaign funds to pay some of the penalties?” a reporter asked Trump after it was disclosed that he had spent $50m in donor money on lawyers’ fees in 2023.
“What penalties?” Trump answered.
“In the New York fraud case and the defamation case.”
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” Trump said. “I mean, that’s been proven as far as I’m concerned.”
Sidney Blumenthal is a Guardian US columnist. He is a former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth
