She Made Him Do It Theory of Everything

"The rhetoric and logic of the abuse of power operates similarly at all scales, which is why I've found feminism such useful equipment for understanding authoritarians in public and political life. Because no matter what abusers take from their victims, they don't want to take the blame. And one of the prerogatives of power is to be in charge of blame, and abusers routinely exercise that power to make their own acts someone else's fault.

Let me start with where we used to hear "she made him do it" all the time--in sexual assault and gender violence. The logic was that somehow women were very powerful, which is why they got raped and beat up--their power consisted in making men to do things, which men were powerful enough in the sense of brute force to do but powerless in the sense of moral agency or self-control to resist doing. The idea that all this was a result of men losing control was always undermined by the fact that a person who truly has no self-control will act heedlessly, recklessly, and these acts were usually carried out covertly, in an effort to escape hostile witnesses and consequences.

Trump himself almost routinely accuses his opponents of intentions and crimes of which he himself is guilty, including efforts to steal elections. It's a well-known psychological phenomenon: "the unconscious defense mechanism that Freud called projection: the attribution of one’s own forbidden – and typically malevolent – motives, impulses, or emotions to others. When people project, what is true about oneself instead becomes true of others." Trump is specifically the most prolific, shameless, and public practitioner of a version of projection that Dr. Jennifer Frey dubbed DARVO in 1997. That's an acronym for deny, attack, reverse victim and offender, a frequent technique of abusers to shift blame to victims. Among his many DARVO moves, Trump has accused his rivals of trying to steal an election and Zelensky of being a dictator. [Ted] Cruz was engaging in it too, when he was making out Democrats as troublemakers for not being nicer about a violent coup attempt.

In mainstream discourse, it's become standard to blame the excesses of the right on liberals, the left, feminists, Black Lives Matter, affirmative action, environmental protection, and BIPOC and LGBTQ people. It's a way that the right is granted masculine prerogatives and the left feminine responsibilities for the right's behavior. It's also routine to blame the Democratic Party for what the Republican Party does. The two parties are unconsciously regarded as akin to a husband and wife in a traditional marriage in which it's the job of the wife to placate and soothe the husband and help him realize his goals or be held responsible for his outbursts and outrages."

Rebecca Solnit 

DARVO, a favorite technique of abusers to shift blame onto their victims; deny, attack, reverse victim and offender (DARVO). Now that's a realm (and social pathology) in which Grump is truly a King. What a fantastic textbook case; scholars will be unpacking this one for decades: The DARVO POTUS. 

And a brilliant feminist caricature of patriarchy: "The two parties are unconsciously regarded as akin to a husband and wife in a traditional marriage in which it's the job of the wife to placate and soothe the husband and help him realize his goals or be held responsible for his outbursts and outrages." 

IOW, blaming the Dem's "woke mind virus," their "excessive liberalism," for armed mobs and forced deportations and Neo-Nazis and demolition of government services and whatever other illiberal republican extremes. The radical "defund the police" communist Dems shouldn't have pissed off Grump and Leon, who are now just trying to deliver the democratic will of the people, according to our two-party dysfunctional marriage.  

Albert O. Hirschman in his book, The Rhetoric of Reaction (1991), cites the three pillars of reactionary rhetoric in the modern period: "perversity," "futility," and "jeopardy." In a way, Solnit's she-made-him-do-it theory traces back to all three pillars of reactionary thought: Helping victims of sexual abuse, perversely, will increase the claims of abuse, government help is futile when more government is the problem, and helping victims of abuse jeopardizes the authority of men in positions of power. 

Blaming women, the poor, and minorities for oppressive conservative extremes is a time honored, if a shamefully abusive, tradition.