What do former US president Donald Trump and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, have in common? Jessie Barton Hronešová and Daniel Kreiss write that both are using a communications strategy of hijacking victimhood – arguing that they have been victimised by groups they oppose – which in turn ignores the suffering of historically marginalized groups. They argue that by hijacking the idea of victimhood, Orbán and Trump are taking advantage of traditional views of victims as innocent and to be supported which in turn sows moral confusion about what and who is just or unjust. 

In a speech on March 15, 2024, Viktor Orbán, the Prime Minister of Hungary, yet again railed against the European Union (EU) authorities in Brussels, noting “Brussels is not the first empire to cast its gaze on Hungary. … To make us bend, to make us bow and to squeeze the breath out of us.” His speech drew parallels with Hungarian history under imperial rule of “the [Ottoman] crescent moon,” “the claws of the [Habsburg] double headed eagle,” “the Red Star,” and now Brussels.

Orbán and Trump’s creation of victimhood

In a new work, we argue that when Orbán casts Hungary as a victim of Brusselite elites, and presents the country’s citizens as being under the thumb of their supposed rainbow anti-family and anti-Christian politics, he is ‘hijacking victimhood.’ In essence, Orbán is narratively creating the suffering of dominant Hungarian groups – especially white Christians. In the process, he is delegitimizing the suffering of the immigrants, Muslims, and gay and lesbian Hungarians that actually have a marginalized status in the country.

In a similar fashion – though drawing on different types of suffering purportedly caused by different victimizers – former US President Donald Trump repeatedly casts the Washington elite as victimizing the “righteous people and a righteous public,” as he noted in his inauguration speech from 2017. Since his first presidential campaign in 2016, Trump time and time he alleged that the DC “swamp” and Democrats intentionally kept [white] US citizens in poverty, crushed their livelihoods, destroyed their children’s prospects, denigrated America’s history, founding fathers, and Christian religion, invited “migrants” to “steal jobs,” and allowed “migrant” organised crime and Black Lives Matter protests to run rampant. In his hijacking of the actual, structural victimhood of America’s marginalized and subaltern groups, Trump fashioned himself into the representative and voice of truthful, law-abiding, churchgoing, and thus “morally righteous” [white] Americans.

While both Orbán and Trump engage in a demagogic style of populist politics a highlight of their communication strategy is to ‘hijack’ victimhood. This hijacking works to invert power relations and ignore the actual victimization of groups that have suffered from human-rights violations and long-term discrimination such as ethnic and racial minorities, refugees, women, and LGBTQ+ communities. By casting dominant groups – white Christians in both countries – as victimized, in one stroke these leaders delegitimize the suffering of groups that have been subordinated, numb empathy, elevate their moral righteousness, and erase the obligation of dominant groups to achieve political equality. They also proclaim the greatness of their nations when justly represented by historically dominant white Christian groups. And they position themselves as the protectors of this greatness which is under the constant threat of future victimization.

What we call hijacked victimhood belongs among various other types of ‘strategic victimhood’ including “weaponized victimhood.” Leveraging victimhood strategically is by no means anything aberrant or unusual. Many groups communicate their victimhood – that is the construal of experienced or perceived harms – in a strategic manner to attain or stave off policies, defend or contest power, and/or assert rights. For example, victims of various types of human-rights violations leverage their victimhood to achieve redress and rights. Foreign policy actors draw on past traumas to justify policy responses to perceived threats. Strategic victimhood politics is ultimately about assertions and contestations of perceptions of justice and injustice, which is at the heart of routine politics as such.

How is hijacked victimhood different?

Hijacked victimhood explicitly forges new moral orders. Victimhood originally denoted a special position within a moral hierarchy that elicited empathy and demarcated the contours of a legitimate and generally accepted moral order. Victims – those unjustly harmed, martyred, or oppressed – are supposed to be supported, empathized with, have access to justice and redress, or even pitied. While there are various moral orders of victim statuses, the ideal-type and “true” victim is culturally constructed as innocent, as denoted in the common western media portrayal of victims as “women and children.” Such victims are considered ‘true’ and ‘legitimate’ when they have not partaken in and remain passive in their suffering (there is, of course, a raft of cases of “complex” and even “guilty” victims).

Dominant actors hijack victimhood to change these moral orders and maintain supremacy. To take an example – scholars have noted attacks on female victims of sexual violence that cast the perpetrator as the actual victim – of the #metoo movement, wokeism gone rogue, or biased judicial systems. This is why political actors such as Orbán and Trump – but many others such as Russian President Vladimir Putin and Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić – hijack victimhood to represent and construct the grievances of groups that have historically enjoyed dominance. They understand the political, emotional, and moral potential of victimhood in their pursuit and maintenance of power.

Elekes Andor, CC BY-SA 4.0 <>, via Wikimedia Commons

Hijacked victimhood also delegitimizes the rights-based claims made by non-dominant groups. Leaders use hijacked victimhood to target their political opponents who represent historically marginalized groups. In the US, whites have been constructed as the “innocent race” and victims of “reverse” racism – despite whites historically having outsized social, economic, cultural and political power over other racial groups. Hijacked victimhood not only defuses guilt for past transgressions, it shields dominant groups from moral judgement. The danger of hijacking victimhood thus lies in its ability to numb the moral standing of individuals and groups that have suffered harms, limiting their claims to be deserving of equity.

Hijacked victimhood can also feature a teleological projection of past harms into the future – leading to the only logical conclusion: engaging in the current political battle and supporting the crafter of the message. Both Trump and Orbán cast the world as a place of repeated dangers that need to be prevented. The Great Replacement Theory – a conspiracy that proclaims the white Christian race is deliberately being replaced by non-white and non-Christian “races” is a good example of such a narrative. The Great Replacement draws on past, national experiences of wars, imperial rule, and losses to project them in the future, create fear, and justify taking future actions – including engaging in political violence.

Hijacked victimhood endangers democracy

Finally, hijacked victimhood is a politics of existentialism for dominant groups. When political leaders portray dominant groups as past, current, or future victims, they are in essence justifying whatever actions (including anti-democratic ones) are necessary to prevent dispossession, loss, or death. This includes dominant groups refusing to give up their dominance to ensure political and social equality. The upshot is Orbán’s holding on to power by whatever means necessary and the attempted coup at the US Capitol on January 6^th, 2021. Indeed, hijacked victimhood makes anti-democratic actions, including political violence, morally righteous.

In this way, hijacked victimhood securitizes politics, sows moral confusion about what and who is just or unjust, and misuses an emotionally, politically—and sometimes legally—loaded position of suffering. Orbán, Trump, and others who hijack victimhood blunt rights-based calls from oppressed parts of society. And, by engaging in the strategy of hijacking victimhood these leaders endanger democracies. 

• This article is based on the paper, ‘Strategically Hijacking Victimhood: A Political Communication Strategy in the Discourse of Viktor Orbán and Donald Trump’ in Perspectives on Politics.
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• Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of USAPP – American Politics and Policy, nor the London School of Economics. 
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