From victimhood to victimcould: Hypothetical injury and the 'criminalization' of Donald Trump

This article theorizes how far-right cultural politics leverage hypothetical injuriesand imaginary futures, often through media, to justify agendas of social violence – atechnique I term victimcould. Victimcould is both a representational achievement (alivewithin the cultural repertoires of the far-right) and a justificatory logic (supportingthe cultural legitimacy of far-right political agendas). Working with the conceptof vulnerability politics and building on extant critiques of regressive and ‘tactical’weaponizations of victimhood, I position victimcould as an analytical intervention thatclarifies how far-right claims to victimization strategically exploit both the prospectivetemporality of vulnerability as openness to injury (rather than injury itself) and thedefinitional openness of the unarrived, always-as-yet-undetermined future. I do thisby 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 viralonline six months before his actual arrest occurred, I argue that Trump and his allieshave engaged victimcould to appropriate the cultural legacies of movements like#BlackLivesMatter while strategically inverting the actual material politics of the UScriminal legal system, repositioning wealthy white men (and Trump as their proxy) as itsprimary victims. I conclude by arguing for how and why the concept of victimcould canhelp equip us for the resistance of regressive cultural agendas, and for the recalibratingof public vulnerability politics for progressive ends.