Former President Donald Trump has long sent conflicting messages about those who participated in the January 6, 2021, riot. He has downplayed their actions and claimed the “real” riots were happening at the U.S.-Mexico border. He has promoted conspiracy theories that they were framed and held “hostage” by a deep state conspiracy. And he has praised them as peaceful “patriots.”
But at a rally in Las Vegas on Sunday, Trump offered a new expression that may symbolize how he feels about that fateful day and the role violence plays in his movement.
This victim-warrior mentality is, in fact, at the heart of Trump’s political campaign.
“The J6 warriors were warriors, but most of all they were victims of this,” Trump said. “All they were doing was protesting a stolen election. That’s what they were doing. And the police said, ‘Let them in, let them in, let them in, let them in.’ What a trap.”
Trump has used two contradictory descriptions: on the one hand, he describes the January 6 rioters as “warriors” – people consciously engaged in violence and fighting for a cause – and on the other, he describes them as “victims,” suggesting they were unwitting innocents targeted and entrapped by the Capitol Police.
The tension between Trump’s two accounts may stem from inconsistency. But they make more sense when we consider them as components of a MAGA duality that explains Trump’s authoritarian worldview and political style. By using the word “warriors,” Trump is not just praising the violence of January 6 as a virtue; he is openly inspiring the most radical members of his movement while simultaneously recruiting new warriors to fight for his cause. And by using the word “victims,” Trump is (literally) suggesting that he believes that those who fight for him should be immune from accountability, that even their most brutal acts should be blamed on the authorities who supposedly provoked and ensnared them.
The victim warrior mentality is, in fact, at the heart of Trump’s political activism. Many of his supporters are driven by what political scientists call “white racial resentment” and the belief that Trump voters are the sole or greatest victims of the machinations of the U.S. political and economic system. For example, after Trump’s 2016 election, University of Chicago scholars used survey data to argue that “white fragility”—the fear of losing status relative to other racial groups through no fault of their own—motivated Trump’s white millennial supporters to vote for him. Notably, people who scored higher on the pollster’s measure of “white fragility” were more likely to believe that racism against white people is as big a problem as it is for black people.
And Trump’s movement has been steeped in violence since its inception. He encouraged violence against counter-protesters at rallies, described physical assaults in the media on social media, and praised protesters at white supremacist rallies even after one white man ran over a counter-protester with his car. Trump supported Kyle Rittenhouse, the vigilante who killed a Black Lives Matter protester, and has also threatened military violence against BLM demonstrators. And, of course, he incited a mob to try to stop the transfer of power to President Joe Biden.
The combination of these two identities is chilling. MAGA victim warriors are always disgruntled, aggressive, and ex ante justifying violence because they have been “trapped” by the system. Their defenders, racist, corrupt billionaires accused of sexual abuse, are predators at the top of nearly every imaginable social food chain, and then they complain that they are martyrs. What MAGA victim warriors refuse to admit is that they don’t want to break the rules and fix the system, but rather halt the erosion of social hierarchies. Their cause is not to restore American greatness, but to maintain their own power.
