When Power Plays the Victim: DARVO, Trump, and the Politics of Reversed Harm
When politicians are accused of wrongdoing, some do not just deny it. They attack the accuser, cast scrutiny as persecution, and present themselves as the true injured party. Psychology has a name for this pattern: DARVO. The deeper question is not whether politics invented it, but why modern politics seems so willing to reward it.
The accusation is no longer the story
There was a time, at least in democratic fantasy, when public accountability was supposed to follow a fairly plain script. An allegation emerged. Evidence was examined. A defence was offered. Institutions, journalists, and voters tried, however imperfectly, to sort truth from spin. Increasingly, that script feels outdated. In its place we often get something more emotionally efficient and morally disorienting: deny the wrongdoing, attack the person raising it, then insist that the real victim is not the harmed party but the powerful figure under scrutiny. Psychology calls this DARVO, short for Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender. The term comes from Jennifer Freyd’s work on abuse and betrayal, but the pattern now feels grimly legible in public life too.
That does not mean we can cleanly prove a year by year rise in “political DARVO” with some neat historical chart. The research base is much stronger on what DARVO is, how it affects observers, and how victimhood can be strategically weaponised in politics than it is on measuring its frequency across decades of political speech. Still, the broader connection is hard to miss. Recent political communication scholarship describes “strategic victimhood” and even “hijacked victimhood” as recurring ways powerful leaders portray dominant groups, and often themselves, as unfairly threatened in order to protect status, deflect blame, and justify retaliation. In other words, even where the exact acronym is not used, the logic is familiar.
What is DARVO?
DARVO stands for Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender. Psychologist Jennifer Freyd coined the term to describe a common response pattern used by some perpetrators when confronted with wrongdoing.
First, they Deny what happened.
Then they Attack the accuser or anyone raising the issue.
Finally, they Reverse Victim and Offender, presenting themselves as the true victim while casting the harmed person, or the person asking questions, as the real aggressor.
DARVO is a useful pattern for recognising rhetorical deflection, but it is not a magic proof machine. It should prompt closer attention to evidence, not replace it.
D
Deny what happened.A
Attack the person raising it.R
Reverse the narrative.V
Claim victimhood.O
Cast the offender as the offended party.
DARVO began in the psychology of abuse, not the psychology of elections
That origin matters. DARVO was not coined as a lazy insult for people we dislike. Freyd introduced it to describe a recognisable response pattern used by perpetrators when called to account: denial of the act, attack on the confronter, and a reversal in which the accused becomes the supposedly injured party while the harmed person, or whistleblower, is recast as the aggressor. Later research gave the concept empirical weight. Harsey, Zurbriggen, and Freyd found that DARVO was commonly reported in confrontations over wrongdoing, and that greater exposure to it was associated with greater self-blame among those doing the confronting. That is important because DARVO is not only evasive. It is destabilising. It does not merely answer an accusation. It tries to scramble the moral map.
Subsequent experimental work sharpened the point. In vignette studies, participants exposed to DARVO judged perpetrators as less abusive and less responsible, while rating victims as less believable and more blameworthy. More recent work has also linked self-reported DARVO tendencies with rape myth acceptance and sexual-harassment perpetration, suggesting that DARVO is not just a spur of the moment defence but may reflect a broader worldview that minimises accountability and legitimises victim-blaming. That does not mean every politician using victim language is engaged in DARVO. It does mean the tactic has predictable social effects when it is used.
Politics is almost custom built for DARVO
Why does this pattern travel so well from abusive interpersonal settings into political life? Because politics is not only about facts. It is about identity, coalition, status, narrative, and perceived threat. A politician under pressure is rarely speaking only to investigators or opponents. They are speaking to loyalists, donors, commentators, party machines, and a wider audience already primed to see enemies everywhere. In that environment, a factual defence can be weaker than a tribal one. “I did nothing wrong” is one move. “They are coming for me, and by extension for you” is often stronger.
This is where political DARVO becomes especially potent. It turns accountability into persecution. It reframes scrutiny as abuse. It invites supporters to stop asking, “Did this happen?” and start asking, “Why are they doing this to our side?” That is a radically different question, and a much easier one to answer in polarised systems. Once a leader has fused their own fate with the fate of the group, any challenge to them can be sold as a challenge to the group itself. That is the deeper psychological power of reversed victimhood. It is not just self-defence. It is identity management under fire.
Trump did not invent DARVO, but he may be its most fluent political performer
Donald Trump is a particularly clear case because the sequence is often visible almost step by step. In his 2019 statement responding to E. Jean Carroll’s allegation, Trump denied ever having met her, attacked her motives by suggesting book promotion and political agenda, and then escalated into a broader conspiracy frame, claiming that people should “pay dearly” for false accusations and implying Democratic coordination. The psychology here is almost textbook. The accusation is not merely denied. The accuser is recast as opportunistic and malicious, and the accused becomes the wronged party targeted by larger hostile forces.
What makes Trump especially revealing is that the rhetoric persisted even when the legal picture moved against him. In separate civil cases, juries found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation, and appeals courts later upheld the judgments, including the $83.3 million defamation award in September 2025. Yet the broader rhetorical style did not fundamentally change. The frame remained persecution, witch-hunt, unfairness, hostile elites, political enemies. That continuity suggests that DARVO in politics is not mainly about persuading neutral fact-checkers. It is about preserving moral legitimacy with one’s own side, even after institutions have ruled against you.
Trump is therefore useful not because he is unique, but because he is unusually textbook. He says the quiet part loudly. He makes visible a structure that many others perform more politely. The deny phase says the allegation is false. The attack phase says the accuser, institution, journalist, or judge is corrupt. The reversal phase says the real scandal is what has been done to him. Once you see that sequence, a great deal of modern political messaging starts to look less like spontaneous outrage and more like an organised defence against accountability.
And no, it is not just Trump
Boris Johnson’s resignation statement in 2023 followed a strikingly similar emotional logic. He insisted there was no evidence that he had knowingly or recklessly misled the Commons, then attacked the Privileges Committee as a “kangaroo court” determined to drive him out. Shortly afterwards, the committee concluded that he had deliberately misled Parliament. Again, the pattern is familiar: deny wrongdoing, attack the legitimacy of the process, then recast the accused as the victim of an unjust campaign.
Andrew Cuomo’s response to sexual-harassment allegations also travelled in this direction. During the controversy he attacked critics as reckless and politically motivated, framed the pressure on him as “cancel culture,” and refused to resign on that basis. Later, the New York Attorney General’s investigation concluded that Cuomo had sexually harassed multiple women and violated state and federal law. The details differ. The pattern does not. The point is not that every political scandal is identical, but that modern leaders across contexts increasingly seem to reach for the same defensive architecture when their legitimacy is threatened.
Why audiences fall for it
If DARVO were merely clumsy deflection, it would fail more often than it does. Its success lies in how neatly it exploits ordinary social cognition. People are highly responsive to confidence, certainty, and signals of grievance. They are also vulnerable to motivated reasoning, especially when they are already emotionally or politically invested. If I strongly identify with a leader, then evidence against that leader threatens not just my opinion but my group identity, my past choices, and perhaps my sense of moral belonging. DARVO offers relief. It says you do not need to revise your worldview. You just need to identify the real villain.
The research on observers helps explain why this matters. When people are exposed to DARVO, they become more likely to see the perpetrator as believable and the victim as less credible or more blameworthy. In political contexts, that can translate into something very useful for a scandal-ridden leader: not universal exoneration, but just enough confusion, doubt, tribal anger, and narrative fog to prevent collapse. DARVO does not need to convince everyone. It only needs to harden enough loyalists, muddy enough public perception, and exhaust enough observers that accountability becomes one more partisan spectacle rather than a reckoning.
The newer findings linking DARVO with rape myth acceptance are also revealing beyond the immediate context of sexual misconduct. They suggest DARVO is sustained by a wider moral style, one that normalises blame displacement and treats accusation itself as suspect. Transport that into politics and the implications are obvious. Citizens primed to see accusers as opportunists, outsiders, or enemies are easier to recruit into reversed victim narratives. Once that cultural reflex is established, power can present itself as embattled innocence with surprising ease.
So is there a real link between modern politics and DARVO?
Yes, but the link needs phrasing carefully. The strongest claim is not that politicians recently discovered DARVO, nor that all political self-defence is DARVO. The stronger claim is that contemporary political conditions reward DARVO-like rhetoric. Highly polarised media systems, personality-centred leadership, grievance-based mobilisation, and the normalisation of strategic victimhood all make the tactic more usable and more visible. Scholarship on authoritarian populism now explicitly treats victimhood claims as a central communicative resource, not an occasional flourish. In that sense, what looks like a “rise” in DARVO may partly be a rise in the incentive structures that make reversed victimhood politically profitable.
This is big because it changes what public accountability has to contend with. The problem is no longer only false denial. It is moral inversion. If enough people can be persuaded that scrutiny is oppression, then democratic oversight starts to feel cruel, journalism starts to look like harassment, and institutions doing their job start to seem like partisan abusers. That is one reason DARVO is so corrosive in politics. It does not merely protect the individual politician. It attacks the legitimacy of the mechanisms meant to judge them.
The crucial caveat
Still, this is where we need to stay psychologically honest. DARVO is a pattern, not a verdict. A person can respond defensively without every allegation against them being true. A politician can weaponise victimhood while also being correct on some specific detail. So the value of DARVO as a concept is not that it lets us skip evidence. It is that it tells us what kind of rhetorical move may be happening in front of us. It is a signal to slow down, protect the facts, and notice when the conversation has been dragged away from what was done and toward how unfair it supposedly is to ask.
That, perhaps, is the most important inference of all.
Simply Put
The political danger of DARVO is not just that some leaders lie. Politicians have always lied. The danger is that modern audiences are increasingly asked to experience accountability itself as a form of abuse. Once that emotional swap takes hold, power no longer needs to refute criticism. It only needs to look wounded by it. And when power learns to perform injury well enough, whole publics can end up protecting the very people they should be scrutinising.
References
Freyd, J. J. (n.d.). DARVO. Jennifer Joy Freyd. Retrieved March 24, 2026.
Harsey, S. J., Adams-Clark, A. A., & Freyd, J. J. (2024). Associations between defensive victim-blaming responses (DARVO), rape myth acceptance, and sexual harassment. PLOS ONE, 19(12), e0313642. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0313642
Harsey, S. J., & Freyd, J. J. (2023). The influence of deny, attack, reverse victim and offender and insincere apologies on perceptions of sexual assault. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 38(17-18), 9985-10008. https://doi.org/10.1177/08862605231169751
Harsey, S. J., & Freyd, J. J. (2020). Deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender (DARVO): What is the influence on perceived perpetrator and victim credibility? Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma, 29(8), 897-916. https://doi.org/10.1080/10926771.2020.1774695
Harsey, S. J., Zurbriggen, E. L., & Freyd, J. J. (2017). Perpetrator responses to victim confrontation: DARVO and victim self-blame. Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma, 26(6), 644-663. https://doi.org/10.1080/10926771.2017.1320777
Hronešová, J. B., & Kreiss, D. (2024). Strategically hijacking victimhood: A political communication strategy in the discourse of Viktor Orbán and Donald Trump. Perspectives on Politics, 22(3), 717-735. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592724000239
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