Tyrants have a playbook for avoiding blame. Trump follows it

In my decades as a cultural anthropologist studying authoritarianism in Russia and the United States, I’ve learned that one of power’s most useful tricks is making responsibility vanish. Autocrats convince people that the harms they create are someone else’s fault — or no one’s fault at all.

I first thought about this sort of doublespeak in an ordinary situation. In the 2000s, as I completed my doctoral research in northern Russia, an older friend tried to teach me a lesson about dressing warmly. She stopped in the middle of the woods during a walk, looked with disapproval at my light jacket, and threw her hands up in mock confusion, surveying the snow-encrusted pines. She said, “I seem to have lost my way!” I stared, knowing she could find her way home easily. My friend continued, “I hope we don’t freeze to death!” (Having grown up during Joseph Stalin’s dictatorship in the 1940s and 1950s, when authorities sometimes took relatives away for criticizing the regime, she had learned to talk about human missteps as if they simply happened, with no one behind them.) Shivering in the woods, I found myself acting like we were really lost, even though she was the agent of chaos.

Not much later, I would consider the role of language in disguising accountability during an investigation into mistreatment of children in Russian orphanages. Government doctors I met pointed to kids’ physical wasting and inability to speak as signs that they were “defective.” Local activists told a different story: It was kids’ prolonged isolation from their families that caused them to languish. Doctors and relatives described to me how children’s bodies and minds deteriorated after they were warehoused in heavily guarded institutions.

Distance, not just walls, makes it easier to evade responsibility — and to discourage questions. In the late 2010s, as a Navy spouse and a parent of young children, I realized that official and informal talking points about supporting the troops and “embracing the suck” of military life overlooked the realities of irresponsible leadership decisions and neglect.

A children’s book I received from a spouses’ group warned military kids that danger lay far beyond America’s borders, in the form of enemies who sought to harm us here at home, and that service members were overseas to protect us from such evildoers. These sanitized accounts ignored the homemade dangers, such as the health problems fostered by an overstretched military — realities many children would face when a changed parent finally came home. 

I read such stories aloud and adhered to commanding officers’ warnings to keep “notes to the boat” free of any references to stress at home, lest we lower troop morale. My children’s faces, whenever they asked if the sailors were OK, made me wonder how reassured those stories really made them feel during prolonged separations. One of my kids worried aloud that the ship might be “stuck” in the ocean. Conversations like this reminded me that people with little power are often attuned to the differences between what they hear from authorities and what they know in their guts.

When choice isn’t really a choice

Doublespeak that deflects responsibility can be hard to spot, but patterns of storytelling by our leaders in the second Trump administration make human suffering look inevitable or mask it altogether. America’s homegrown narratives also have a distinctively national flavor, portraying the choices made by individuals as determining their fate.

For instance, the Trump administration’s Customs and Border Protection website touts the agency’s “self-deportation” program for immigrants, offering undocumented residents a $2,600 “exit bonus” should they leave the country voluntarily. The site reads that “self-deportation is the best New Year’s resolution that an illegal alien can accomplish. It’s a fast, free, and easy process” that CBP arranges and pays for. Yet according to a May 2026 Washington Post investigation, of more than 80,000 “voluntary departure” orders issued by immigration judges between January 2025 and March 2026, more than 70% involved people who were already detained. 

If staying or leaving is the choice under those circumstances, it’s not a good one: Immigrants in U.S. detainment facilities are living with inadequate food, water, medical care, space to move and necessities like private, clean places to shower and use the bathroom. Numerous reports document torture and mistreatment of detainees by federal officers, and dozens of people have died in ICE detention in the past year and a half.

One dad’s personal war 

Immigrants are not the only group whose limited choices are portrayed as freely made. Political leaders and ordinary Americans sometimes talk about military service members and war the same way.

Take the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, which returned to port in Thailand in early September after nine months at sea. President Trump dismissed families’ concerns about deteriorating mental health among the crew and said that the boat’s deployment “was not nearly long enough.” 

Despite first-hand reports from sailors corroborating some of the original concerns, Trump has not retracted his original statement.

Although the president never directly explained his rationale for claiming the deployment should have been even longer, some media accounts treat the undeclared war with Iran as a sufficient explanation for the deployment’s unusual length, without questioning why the U.S. is at war. For example, a recent Reuters report documenting the carrier’s port stop states, “Typically naval deployments ​are for between six and nine months, but those can be extended during times of conflict.” While that is accurate, statements like this make the conflict seem normal and perhaps unavoidable, rather than the result of a linked set of decisions that might themselves be scrutinized.

For troops’ families, such abstractions, repeated in media discourse, have concrete consequences when their loved ones don’t come home on time. I spoke recently with Jefferson Kelley, an Ohio father of three, one of them being 20-year-old sailor Jackson Kelley, who serves on the Lincoln. The senior Kelley shared his thoughts on Trump’s response to questions about the deployment’s length and harsh conditions, including the president’s comments, reported by CNN, that the boat had faced multiple attacks.

“Let’s just conveniently leave out the part about who started another forever war,” Kelley said. “And the part about how we started a war of choice that’s not congressionally approved.” Comments from Trump and the boat’s captain separately emphasized that there were multiple ballistic missile and drone attacks against the Lincoln, which were deflected by destroyers surrounding it. Kelley’s account widens the frame: Our storytelling about war too often ignores questions about who started it, whether there were real defensive reasons or clear military objectives in play, and how poorly we protected our people from avoidable harm.

Military authorities put effort into messaging that ultimately obscures responsibility and causality, and family members who speak out sometimes fear real repercussions for themselves and loved ones. For example, Kelley expressed concern that other sailors may bully Jackson because his father had tried to help those on the boat and to bring Jackson home. In that case, Kelley worried, even his “Take Me Instead” letter — in which he asked his senator to arrange for him to trade places with Jackson — might jeopardize his son’s naval career.

All this unfolded against considerable noise from commenters on Kelley’s Military Times interview on the Lincoln deployment. Some veterans, in particular, insisted that service members knew what they’d signed up for and suggested Kelley ought to accept the conditions his son might face. One listed his own multiple combat Army deployments, which included opportunities to resupply when needed. The commenter admitted that conditions can be harsh for service members but said that troops ought to “suck it up” because he had. 

As my talk with Kelley wound down, he said, “I wonder if I did the right thing or not.” Then his face lit up like the sun hit it. Speaking of the other sailors on the boat, he said, “I would think that the overwhelming majority would be like, Jackson, you got a cool dad.” 

When people tell the story

That brings me back to the incident many years ago, as I stood in the Russian woods with my friend, underdressed and with my teeth beginning to chatter. I stepped closer and looked her in the eye. I understood that it was not culturally acceptable in Russia to confront an older person of authority, so I steeled myself. “You know the way,” I said. “Let’s go home.”

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It’s become a cliché that journalists ought to speak truth to power. I think the task is more specific than that: telling the longer story. Leaders with the loudest microphones, and people farthest removed from the consequences of their decisions, can make prolonged deployments, wounded or damaged people and divided families seem inevitable by leaving out who made it happen and how. Eyewitness accounts can restore the missing parts of the story, including what happens afterward. When critical voices become part of the historical record, the truth can finally make it home.