FROM VICTIMHOOD TO VICTIMCOULD: HYPOTHETICAL INJURY AND THE ‘CRIMINALIZATION’ OF DONALD TRUMP
Nov. 2025
This article theorizes how far-right cultural politics leverage hypothetical injuries and imaginary futures, often through media, to justify agendas of social violence – a technique I term victimcould. Victimcould is both a representational achievement (alive within the cultural repertoires of the far-right) and a justificatory logic (supporting the cultural legitimacy of far-right political agendas). Working with the concept of vulnerability politics and building on extant critiques of regressive and ‘tactical’ weaponizations of victimhood, I position victimcould as an analytical intervention that clarifies how far-right claims to victimization strategically exploit both the prospective temporality of vulnerability as openness to injury (rather than injury itself) and the definitional openness of the unarrived, always-as-yet-undetermined future. I do this by way of an illustrative example: the so-called ‘criminalization’ of Donald Trump. Analyzing a series of AI-generated images of Trump’s could-be arrest that went viral online six months before his actual arrest occurred, I argue that Trump and his allies have engaged victimcould to appropriate the cultural legacies of movements like #BlackLivesMatter while strategically inverting the actual material politics of the US criminal legal system, repositioning wealthy white men (and Trump as their proxy) as its primary victims. I conclude by arguing for how and why the concept of victimcould can help equip us for the resistance of regressive cultural agendas, and for the recalibrating of public vulnerability politics for progressive ends.
CITE
Higgins, K. C. (2025). From victimhood to victimcould: Hypothetical injury and the ‘criminalization’ of Donald Trump. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 0(0).
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