From the start of his encounter with Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Feb. 28, President Donald Trump attempted to shatter the Ukrainian president’s pretensions to being an honorable wartime leader. Greeting Zelenskyy’s arrival at the White House entrance, Trump’s first words were, “You’re all dressed up.” Trump then turned to the bevy of reporters and pointed at Zelenskyy to say, “He’s all dressed up, today.”
The mockery of Zelenskyy’s martial attire escalated during the 45-minute press conference, when the right-wing reporter and Trump ally Brian Glenn (the boyfriend of hardcore MAGA supporter Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene) asked Zelenskyy why he refused to “respect” the “office” by wearing a suit. “Do you own a suit?” Glenn asked, which drew a grin from Trump. The derision of Zelenskyy’s sartorial choice on this high-stakes diplomatic occasion was more than dissonant jesting: It was exemplary of a humiliation ritual orchestrated by arguably the most powerful person in the world.
The ridiculing of Zelenskyy’s clothing was the prelude to a tag-team scolding of Zelenskyy, live in front of a global television audience. It was humiliation TV, with the press conference’s drama resembling the narrative arc of an episode of Trump’s reality show “The Apprentice.” As the climax neared, Vice President JD Vance rebuked Zelenskyy for attending a Joe Biden campaign rally in October and failing to publicly “thank” Trump for his service to Ukraine. Trump then explained to Zelenskyy that the Ukrainian was “playing cards” but did not hold “the cards.”
The drama of this humiliation was inseparable from the broader shift in U.S. strategy, which, according to these theatrics, hinged on how much respect Zelenskyy showed Trump in a single meeting. The episode concluded with footage of Zelenskyy unceremoniously leaving the White House in the manner of a fired contestant on “The Apprentice.”
How can we account for the range of political and strategic uses of such spectacles of humiliation, which have become inextricable from the exercise of U.S. power? It is tempting to attribute this development to Trump alone and those who have enabled his ascent and return to power. But in fact, Trump’s role as humiliator-in-chief is more comprehensible within the broader historical context of a dynamic of humiliation that figured centrally in the 9/11 attacks and the United States’ response to them.
As it was intended to do, al Qaeda’s September 2001 assault penetrated, violated and exploded the symbols of U.S. economic and military domination. At the apex of its post-Cold War superiority, the U.S. was suddenly victimized in front of a global audience in an attack that cost the perpetrators half a million dollars to execute. The images of the planes striking their targets repeated endlessly, capturing the moment when illusions of American invulnerability in a unipolar world were shattered. Writing in The Weekly Standard earlier that year, Robert Kagan and William Kristol decried the “profound national humiliation that President Bush” had “brought upon the United States” after a Chinese pilot crashed into a U.S. surveillance plane and the U.S. aircrew was held by the Chinese government. Since Bush had not ruled out a formal apology to Beijing for the incident, as the Chinese government demanded, he had, according to Kagan and Kristol, placed the world’s “sole superpower” on the “path to humiliation.” If Bush’s failure to rule out an apology risked national humiliation, then the failure of the Bush administration and the national security state to prevent the 9/11 attacks was most certainly a much greater “national humiliation” from the perspective of the likes of Kristol and Kagan (though they did not say so).
By the time of al Qaeda’s “planes operation,” as the group called it, the pleasure of humiliation and degradation was entrenched in U.S. culture, not least in reality television and talk radio. Howard Stern, whose shock-jock radio show was broadcasting live on Sept. 11, 2001, learned that a second plane had hit the World Trade Center while he was in the middle of telling a story about how he had touched Pamela Anderson’s “ass.” “It’s war,” said Stern, immediately. “We’ve got to bomb the hell out of them. You know who it is. I can’t say, but I know who it is.”
In a different register, the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, writing from Jerusalem the day after the attack, exclaimed that this was “World War III,” which would be a “long, long war” waged against “superempowered angry young people from failed states.” In short, expressions of outrage flowed seamlessly from humiliation into declarations of war, presumed to target the Middle East, even before it was known who had perpetrated the attack.
Friedman, a voice of the elite foreign policy establishment, was one of the few insiders who came to focus his political analysis on humiliation after 9/11. “If I’ve learned one thing covering world affairs,” wrote Friedman in 2003, “it’s this: The single most underappreciated force in international relations is humiliation.”
But Friedman was concerned with “their” humiliation, not “our” humiliation. At the same time, he used his columns to help translate “World War III,” or what Bush called the “global war on terror,” into a U.S. invasion of Iraq. Friedman never bought into the baseless claim — widely believed by the U.S. public — that Saddam Hussein was complicit in 9/11. His support for the invasion was rooted in his diagnosis of Arab and Muslim “humiliation” by the “contrast” between their “poverty, ignorance, and repression” and “the West.” The best answer to this “poverty of dignity” — which Friedman claimed drove “them to suicidal revenge” — was “regime change and democratization.”
Once the Iraq invasion occurred, Friedman surmised that for the war on terror to succeed and for a new Middle East — one that fostered Arab-Israeli tranquility — to emerge, American policymakers needed to remain sensitive to Arab and Muslim humiliation and the dignity it undermined. Friedman conjectured, without evidence, that U.S. forces had not received a “standing ovation” from Iraqis after the toppling of Saddam Hussein in part “because many Iraqis feel humiliated that they didn’t liberate themselves, and America’s presence, even its aid, reminds them of that.” He called for a U.S. strategy of “dehumiliation and re-dignification.”
Friedman’s assumptions about humiliation — who the humiliated parties were and the causes of their humiliation — accorded with old-school Orientalists like Bernard Lewis and Raphael Patai. Friedman assumed the existence of an Arab and Muslim predisposition to humiliation rooted in what Lewis called “an awareness, among the heirs of an old, proud, and long dominant civilization, of having been overtaken and overborne, and overwhelmed by those who they regarded as their inferiors.”
Besides these Orientalist assumptions, Friedman did not grasp the multidirectionality of humiliation. For example, he did not understand how the humiliation of the U.S. by 9/11 generated the climate in which he could describe the message of the U.S. invasion of Iraq to the Middle East as, quote: “Suck. On. This.”
Nor did Friedman ever comprehend how the humiliating experience of the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq affected the decision-making of American elites or popular sentiments in the U.S. in the decades that followed. In fact, when Friedman shifted his attention to the humiliation of Trump voters in 2020, he did not connect Trump’s success with these audiences to the humiliating experiences of the U.S. war on terror, instead explaining it as a more generic “poverty of dignity.” By contrast, Trump has since dwelled on the humiliation of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, calling it “perhaps the most embarrassing moment in the history of our country” in his March 2025 address to Congress.
Trump’s political indomitability owes much to his fluency in what the scholar Roxanne Euben has called the “affective Esperanto” of humiliation in 21st-century international affairs. But he is not alone among those — whether heads of state, insurgent warriors or corporate CEOs — who have mastered this affective style now at the center of how international politics is practiced.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu embodies the paradoxes of this style. Because Netanyahu had built his political career on the premise that whatever means he employed were justified by the ends of Israeli security, the success of “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood” (Hamas’ code name for the attacks of Oct. 7, 2023) humiliated him. Yet even though drawing attention to the magnitude of the calamity for Israel reinforced the extent of his failures, Netanyahu chose to exaggerate the injuries caused to Israelis by the Hamas-led attack. He repeatedly reiterated largely debunked claims that the attackers had beheaded babies, used rape as a weapon of war and burned Jews in ovens. By amplifying the victimization and humiliation of Israelis and Jews everywhere as a result of his government’s security breakdown, he reinforced his description of Israel’s counter-humiliation in genocidal terms. So Netanyahu spoke of Palestinian children as Nazis with one breath and of striking back at Amalek, a reference to the genocide of enemies of the Israelites in the Old Testament, with the next.
Netanyahu and Trump exemplify a political style we can call that of the “humiliation entrepreneur.” The humiliation entrepreneur (a term coined by the psychologist Evelin Lindner) negotiates his relations with adversaries, allies and other audiences alike through an interplay of his own victimhood, the humiliation of the other and the threat of further humiliation. Both Trump and Netanyahu crafted and built their legitimacy around victimization narratives that combined national and personal humiliations into a single story that justified their claims to authority and rationalized their support for cruelty. The operating principle is that every insult and humiliation demands an equal or greater counter-insult and counter-humiliation. In their efforts to portray hypermasculinity, practically every event, every interaction, is interpreted via a culture of honor in which they must perform the prerogatives of domination.
To take a case in point, consider Netanyahu’s modus operandi with Biden. Despite all of Biden’s support for the way Israel waged the Gaza war — and despite the costs to Biden’s presidency of this support — Netanyahu ritually revealed the Biden administration to be diplomatically helpless. For example, in May 2024, Biden triumphantly announced the acceptance of what he claimed was an Israeli ceasefire deal. Following Biden’s announcement, Netanyahu summarily rejected the deal. When Netanyahu joined Trump during a White House visit in early February 2025, both took turns criticizing Biden for not supplying more bombs for Israel’s slaughter, even after the unprecedented amount of weaponry that Biden’s administration provided had garnered him the moniker “Genocide Joe” among progressive critics.
The convergence of Netanyahu’s and Trump’s fantasies and illusions represented a culminating moment in the merging of strategy with the emotional currency of humiliation and outrage. The two leaders’ shared fantasy is that Israel, with U.S. support, can ethnically cleanse Gaza through destructive vengeance for Al-Aqsa Flood and the near-total devastation wrought by 16 months of bombing, which human rights organizations have dubbed a genocide. Their shared illusion is that the U.S. and Israel can, in tandem, exert their will over the Middle East without any concern for the animosity, resentment and resistance that their deeds and words stir. Both fantasy and illusion underscore America’s abandonment of its long-standing pretense to be an objective outside observer in the Middle East. This abandonment is rooted in the entwinement of U.S. national security elites, Western elites and Israeli society into an emotional community, based on overlapping victimization narratives, that has become more insular, embattled and isolated. The style of humiliation perfected by Netanyahu and Trump was as much a product of the longer history of U.S.-Middle East relations as it was of the personal histories of the two leaders.
Perhaps no incident better explains this than the U.S. response to the global spectacle of the Black September Organization’s attack on the Israeli Olympic team at the 1972 Munich Olympics. The Richard Nixon administration vacillated between accepting Israeli victimhood and restraining the Jewish state. Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, worried about the emotions swirling inside Israel. “The trouble with the Jews,” Nixon told Kissinger and his aide Alexander Haig, “is that they’ve always played these things in terms of outrage.” “It’s going to be the goddamnest thing you’ve ever saw,” Nixon added. Kissinger agreed. He saw in Munich a Sarajevo moment for the Middle East, fearing that unbridled Israeli revenge risked destabilizing global politics by attempting to humiliate Arab regimes, upsetting U.S.-Soviet detente and instigating a regional war.
The Kissingerian approach was to temper Israeli emotionalism with crafty diplomacy while also tolerating Israeli performances of revenge within certain bounds. So the Nixon administration permitted the Israeli punishment of “terrorists” and “terrorist camps” with U.S. weapons after Munich, meaning the targeting of Palestinians in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and numerous assassinations across Europe, so long as the Israelis did not overdo it by invading an Arab capital.
At the same time, Kissinger advised Nixon that demonstrating that the U.S. shared Israel’s perspective helped to temper the expression of Israeli outrage. He suggested that the U.S. introduce a resolution against “international terrorism” at the United Nations General Assembly and that Nixon create a new Cabinet-level committee dedicated to combating international terrorism, one with lots of “prestige.” Nixon agreed to both suggestions.
Nixon and Kissinger thus understood themselves to be rational political actors tasked with balancing the volatile emotions of both Israelis and Arabs. It was not quite what Edward Said called the “myth of the arrested development of the Semites,” since Zionism was privileged in its expression of emotion. Nevertheless, it accorded with that antisemitic notion, in that it placed sober Western rationality atop the emotional hierarchy above Zionists and then Arabs.
While Ronald Reagan presented his administration as more partisan toward Israel than preceding administrations, he continued to understand the management of Israeli emotional reactions to be the superpower’s imperative. But he struggled to do so, even more than Nixon and Kissinger. For example, as the ceasefire between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) across the Lebanese border broke down in 1982, the Reagan administration “tried very hard to persuade [Prime Minister Menachem] Begin and [Defense Minister Ariel] Sharon that these radical Palestinian elements were trying to goad, manipulate, and provoke them into war,” wrote Reagan in his memoir, “An American Life.” Hard as Reagan officials tried, however, Begin and Sharon “listened, but they did not hear.” The Abu Nidal Organization’s attempted assassination of Israel’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, Shlomo Argov, in London in June 1982 became the pretext for Israel’s invasion of Lebanon that month, despite the fact that Abu Nidal was not based in that country and had no connection to the PLO.
When the Israeli invasion reached Beirut, Reagan chastised Begin: “no matter how villainous the attack on Israel’s diplomat in London had been, it had not given Israel cause to unleash its brutal attack on Beirut.” Yet “Begin wouldn’t give an inch.” “Sickened” by the reports and images streaming out of Beirut in August 1982, Reagan exploded. After Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd called the U.S. president, “begging” him — as Reagan reported in his diary — to do something about Israeli atrocities, Reagan called Begin: “I told him it had to stop or our entire future relationship was endangered. I used the word ‘Holocaust’ deliberately and said the symbol of his country was becoming ‘a picture of a seven month old baby with its arms blown off.’”
Here, Reagan accorded himself the power to express anger and to use the emotive word “Holocaust” to stir Begin, himself a Holocaust survivor. In his diary, Reagan reported to his satisfaction that this manipulation had worked: Begin called back 20 minutes later to tell Reagan that “he’d ordered an end to the barrage and pleaded for our continued friendship.” Accordingly, Reagan believed he had the upper hand in the emotional struggle.
Nevertheless, this power was multidirectional. Begin leveraged his hurt feelings to resist further dictates from Washington. In a subsequent exchange of letters, Begin complained that Reagan had hurt him “personally and deeply, especially through the use of the word ‘Holocaust,’ of which I know some facts which may be unknown to my fellow man.” Begin then pivoted from his wounded feelings to a reassertion of Israel’s right to act in Lebanon as he deemed fit and to exercise Israel’s “determined right to stamp out the scourge of terrorism.” As the historian Seth Anziska has shown, the Reagan administration’s lack of resistance to this “right” contributed directly to the massacres of Palestinian refugees at Sabra and Shatila in September 1982.
The precarious balance of emotional power in the U.S.-Israeli relationship continued into the post-Cold War period. For example, in 1991, when President George H. W. Bush’s administration implored the Israeli government of Yitzhak Shamir not to retaliate for Iraqi Scud missile attacks that struck inside Israel, Shamir’s government complied — despite pressure from the likes of Netanyahu, who was then Israel’s deputy foreign minister and made frequent appearances on CNN wearing a gas mask. U.S. National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft used emotive language when he reported that Defense Department officials Lawrence Eagleburger and Paul Wolfowitz had been dispatched to Israel to “hold the Israeli hand” after the Scud attacks. Bush marveled that he had gotten Shamir to “violate a cardinal Israeli rule: Do not leave terrorist attacks unpunished” for the sake of keeping the U.S. coalition intact.
From the 1967 Six-Day War through the end of the Cold War, the emotional foundations of U.S. power in the Middle East eroded. That power rested on Orientalist assumptions about Western rationality and Middle Eastern emotionality — and, by extension, involved managing the emotional overreactions of regional actors while also permitting Israeli emotionalism within certain bounds.
These shifts in the dynamics of emotional power coincided with a parallel development in the U.S.: centering the Holocaust in American life. The humiliations endured by European Jews became a focus of Holocaust memorialization in the West. These humiliations took many forms, from the mundane to the extreme act of genocide. Recreated in many cultural representations, the figure of the Holocaust survivor exemplified this humiliation. The writer Elie Wiesel, who survived the Holocaust, made his literary career by portraying this survivor — emaciated, homeless and dehumanized — in works such as “Night” (1960).
A double movement intensified in the aftermath of the 1967 war. The Israeli Jew was represented as a masculine citizen-soldier, virile and capable of military prowess against non-Western adversaries, while the figure of the Jewish Holocaust victim, who suffered for lack of American help, became more and more prominent in the West. The coexistence of these two figures had been present in works like Leon Uris’ “Exodus” (1958), but the visibility of both increased with Israel’s expansion through occupation. These two figures coexisted symbiotically, with the victimhood of the latter reinforcing support for the prerogative to “self-defense” of the former. Paradoxically, it was only when Israel had wielded Western backing — and weapons — to demonstrate its military usefulness over its neighbors that Jewish victimhood in the Holocaust became the object of supreme attention in U.S. culture.
The standard narrative of Holocaust memorialization, exemplified by Wiesel, placed Jewish survivors of the Holocaust in a position of emotional exceptionalism. Not only had Jewish survivors suffered from an unparalleled atrocity but, in its aftermath, they had, like Jesus Christ, forgone revenge for what they had suffered. Rather, the Holocaust survivor had sublimated his desire for revenge. According to this image, the links between humiliation, outrage and counter-humiliation were obscured.
Yet this emotional exceptionalism was in fact founded on the repression of the Holocaust survivor’s desire for revenge. For example, Wiesel based “Night” on his Yiddish memoir, “Un Die Welt” (“And the World Kept Silent”). While many scenes in “Night” mirrored those in Wiesel’s memoir, those that expressed the revenge fantasy were excised. Of the survivors in the Yiddish and French versions, we get: “they only thought about food. Not about revenge. Not about their parents. Only about bread. And even when they had satisfied their hunger, they still did not think about revenge.” But the Yiddish continues: “Early the next day Jewish boys ran off to Weimar to steal clothing and potatoes. And to rape German girls. The historical commandment of revenge was not fulfilled.”
“Night,” the Jewish studies scholar Naomi Seidman argues, depicts the “survivor as a witness and as an expression of silence and death, projecting the recently liberated Eliezer’s death-haunted face into the postwar years.” “The Yiddish survivor,” by contrast, “is filled with rage and the desire to live, to take revenge.”
Severing the link between humiliation and the imperative for revenge served the function of making Holocaust memorialization more palatable in the West. For example, the revenge operations of the Jewish Brigade in the British army at the end of World War II, which adopted the Hebrew name Gmul (“Recompense”), received little attention in public memory of the Holocaust. Yet these connections were just beneath the surface. It was not such a far distance from the humiliated survivor to the dedicated avenger.
This simultaneous development in U.S. political culture of Jewish victimhood and the Israeli “right” to attack Arab countries intersected with narratives of American victimization in the post-Vietnam era. Centering on the figure of the “terrorist,” these narratives recapitulated a long-standing Western and American tradition of defining adversaries as barbarians opposed to civilization. American narratives about terrorism after the 1960s followed a familiar script: Through no fault of their own, Americans were targeted by Palestinian, Libyan and generalized Muslim terrorists merely because of who they were. Americans had targets on their backs simply by virtue of being American.
Among the most important crafters of this victimization narrative was Secretary of State George Shultz. In October 1984, Shultz delivered a speech at the Park Avenue Synagogue in Manhattan entitled “Terrorism and the Modern World.” In front of 800 congregants, Shultz described terrorism as a form of “barbarism” in the contemporary age. While the U.S., according to Shultz, demonstrated the ability to deter the Soviet Union from nuclear war, it — and the other democracies of the West — had not effectively deterred the rise of terrorism as a new strategy aimed at depleting U.S. power. The West, and particularly the U.S., had been targeted by terrorism because of the openness of its democracies. At the same time, terrorists had beguiled the public and the media into becoming morally confused about why terrorism occurred. The West was being victimized through its own confusion. Shultz argued that the public should be “outraged” at the moral abomination of the terrorists, rather than lending credence to “root causes” and “grievances.”
Shultz contended that to end the victimization of the free world’s democracies, the U.S. public had to consent “before the fact” to a militant state response to the “terrorists,” one that included preemption and retaliation. To dramatize the point, he warned Americans not to let the U.S. become the “Hamlet of Nations,” “worrying endlessly about whether and how to respond.” Rather, Americans had to muster the moral courage to fight back. Only by not being Hamlet could the U.S. escape the cycle of terrorist humiliations. Shultz’s script was a turning point in the intersection of Israeli and U.S. elite narratives of victimhood after Vietnam, in which Israel was understood as an idealized version of the U.S.
Shultz presented Israel as the model for this kind of public support for preemption and retaliation for terrorism. The Israeli public overwhelmingly supported Israel’s “war” against the “terrorists” and expected the government to use the tools of assassination, extralegal detention and military retaliation as necessary to defeat the PLO, Shiite militants in Lebanon and the “terrorist-sponsoring” regimes in Syria, Iraq and Libya. Shultz emphasized America’s character as a democracy but said little about the rule of law. “Israel’s people have shown the will, and they have provided their government the resources, to fight terrorism,” observed Shultz. “The rest of us would do well to follow Israel’s example.”
Not being the Hamlet of nations, then, meant being like Israel.
Shultz’s developing relationship with Netanyahu, then Israel’s ambassador to the U.N., helped to bring him to the views that he expressed at the Park Avenue Synagogue. The two had begun a professional relationship two years earlier, when they had both arrived in Washington, Netanyahu as an attache to Ambassador Moshe Arens at the Israeli Embassy and Shultz as secretary of state after the resignation of Gen. Alexander Haig. Significantly younger and a relatively low-level official, Netanyahu nevertheless met with Shultz regularly and counseled him about “international terrorism.” Like Shultz, Netanyahu told a story about how the democracies of the West, of which Israel and the U.S. were exemplary, were uniquely vulnerable to the terrorists precisely because they were democracies. The only tenable response, according to Netanyahu, was for the democracies of the West to unite in a collective effort to confront the root of the problem, which, according to Netanyahu, lay in the states that gave succor and harbor to terrorists like the PLO.
While the reception of Netanyahu’s grand victimization narrative in the U.S. ebbed and flowed as his political career ascended, his articulation of that narrative remained remarkably consistent. Constructed as a self-fulfilling prophecy, Netanyahu’s narrative received its irrefutable corroboration in the 9/11 operation. In an interview with The New York Times that day, Netanyahu remarked that al Qaeda’s attack was “very good” for U.S.-Israeli relations. It engendered a shared sense of victimhood, a shared outrage and a shared commitment to retribution that was Netanyahu’s goal.
In testimony before Congress in September 2001, Netanyahu claimed without evidence that the Islamist terrorism network responsible for 9/11, which he asserted included Palestinian groups like Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the PLO, and others associated with the Iranian regime, aimed to “destroy” the U.S. No evidence linking this supposed network has ever emerged. Yet according to Netanyahu’s logic, since it was not possible for this “network” to destroy the U.S. at once, the first objective was therefore to “humiliate” it. In Netanyahu’s reading of history, in fact, this network had again and again humiliated the superpower, such as during the Iran hostage crisis.
According to Netanyahu, the only acceptable response to this humiliation was to unleash the “wrath of the free world” against those states that sustained the Islamist terror network, especially Iraq, Iran and Syria. He recommended that this “wrath” take the form of punitive sanctions and military action. Netanyahu knew that the West had the power to crush “the terrorist network,” but he was unsure whether the West had the will to do so. The time to display this will was running out, Netanyahu warned, because each of these states was on the cusp of attaining nuclear weapons.
Echoing Netanyahu’s moral absolutes — a theme he has come back to often in the years since — the Bush administration stuck to the victimization narrative and sanctioned a global counter-humiliation effort that included military occupation, torture, indefinite detention and targeted assassination: a globalization of the tools of Israel’s war against terrorism.
Yet the Bush administration’s “war on terror” was never based on the kind of broad public support held up as the Israeli ideal. Bush’s efforts to generate a war with Iraq were resisted and opposed by large swaths of the public and engendered cynicism about the use of U.S. military power in generations of Americans. When the invasion descended into a fiasco, killing and injuring hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and leading to the deaths of U.S. soldiers, private contractors and humanitarian workers, public opinion turned permanently against the war. Barack Obama’s viability as a presidential candidate in 2008 rested in part on the perception that he had opposed the invasion of Iraq on principled grounds, unlike his opponents (both in the Democratic primary and the general election).
The same was true of his successor, Donald Trump.
Trump incorporated these failures into the victimization narrative that propelled him to power. He spoke of the “forgotten men” of middle America, whom he promised to redeem. From Trump’s perspective, the U.S. had been victimized by bad trade deals, by “globalist” elites and by immigration policies that undercut the livelihoods and lives of ordinary Americans. Appealing to the resentments and anger exacerbated by the foreign-policy consensus, Trump depicted a U.S. that had been cynically led into endless wars in which American soldiers were being used as a police force in places like Afghanistan and Syria, unable to “win.” Trump promised to either end the wars or let U.S. forces triumph.
Here was the contradictory intersection between Netanyahu’s victimization narrative and Trump’s victimization narrative. In fact, the failure of Netanyahu’s victimization narrative to gain traction in the U.S. opened the way for the success of Trump’s victimization narrative. As the post-9/11 wars became painful quagmires and the economic situation of ordinary Americans became more precarious, many Americans grew disillusioned with the redemptive wars of regime change across the Middle East that Netanyahu championed. Trump’s ability to rechannel this humiliation against ungrateful allies, the political establishment and the mainstream media owed much to the failure of Netanyahu’s fantasy of the “wrath of the free world.”
Nevertheless, in his first term Trump described fighting Islamist terrorism — which, for him, was exemplified first by the Islamic State group and then by Iran and its proxies — as his top national security goal. Embellishing and improvising on the civilization-versus-barbarism theme, Trump aimed to portray terrorist villains, assumed to be Muslim, as sadistic. Killing them was not enough; Trump strove to humiliate them. The Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Trump said, died “whimpering like a dog.” As a humiliation entrepreneur, Trump emphasized his audience’s humiliation, then presented himself as the answer to it, as the counter-humiliator-in-chief.
No longer the “invincible victim” after Al-Aqsa Flood, Israel was just a victim, with Oct. 7 depicted as a continuation of the Holocaust. Yet according to Netanyahu’s culture of honor, this humiliation set the stage for an unprecedented counter-humiliation, widely understood as an attempt at genocide and ethnic cleansing.
Yet it was American victimization, as much as Israeli victimization, that was central to this unprecedented counter-humiliation. To his American interlocutors, Netanyahu framed these events in terms of American victimhood. For example, in his July 2024 address to the U.S. Congress, Netanyahu evoked the feeling of 9/11 with his language. Oct. 7 “began,” he said, as had 9/11, “as a perfect day. Not a cloud in the sky.” He then pivoted to the time-stamp precision of the “9/11 Commission Report,” stating that “at 6:29 a.m., as children were still sleeping soundly in their beds in the towns and kibbutzim next to Gaza, suddenly … 3,000 Hamas terrorists stormed into Israel.”
But for Netanyahu, it was not enough for Oct. 7 to be felt as a repetition of the emotional experience of 9/11: It was orders of magnitude worse. “Proportionately, compared to our population size,” said Netanyahu, “that’s like 20 9/11s in one day.” Imploring Americans to imagine the emotional weight of 20 9/11s, Netanyahu reinforced Israel’s prerogative to act on this emotion. Like the U.S. after 9/11, Israel had the right to unbridled outrage, to “sweep up things related and not,” in the words of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Like the U.S. after 9/11, Israel had the right to make “mistakes” as it pursued justice according to its own dictates. Yet, after 16 months of cataclysmic war in Gaza with the stated aim of destroying Hamas, Hamas remains standing. Despite all the destruction and the high-tech humiliations, despite the unprecedented visibility of Israeli atrocities on social media, Netanyahu has failed to fulfill his promises.
This failure brings us back to the convergence of Netanyahu and Trump in 2025. During his visit to Washington in early February, Netanyahu presented Trump with the gift of two pagers. The first was golden and mounted on a wooden panel, with the inscription: “Press with both hands.” Below that, it read: “To President Donald Trump, Israel’s greatest friend and greatest ally.” The second pager was ordinary and ostensibly functional. Both were of the kind that had been used by the Mossad in the so-called pager attack in Lebanon in September 2024, in which thousands of pagers carried ostensibly by Hezbollah personnel were made to simultaneously explode, killing dozens and injuring over 3,000. According to the press release from Netanyahu’s office, these gifts symbolized “the Prime Minister’s decision that led to a turnaround in the war and the starting point for breaking the spirit” of Hezbollah. They were fitting trophies to honor Trump for his steadfast support of Israel.
But this meaning coexisted with other possible meanings. The inscription “Press with both hands” also mocked the victims of the attack — including civilians and children — who were killed or maimed when they grabbed the pagers. In this reading, Trump was in on the joke and able to take pleasure in it, taunting the adversaries of the U.S. and Israel with his acceptance of it.
On the other hand, the inscription might have been read as a veiled threat to Trump himself: Even he was subject to this device if he chose to deviate too far from Netanyahu’s preferences. That Netanyahu’s gift included a second pager corroborates this implicitly menacing message. The multiplicity of meanings in this symbol-laden gift pointed to the contradictory nature of what Trump emphasized as the “unbreakable bond” between Israel and the U.S. The line between unconditional support and betrayal was a thin one, while the techniques and strategies of power deployed by both Netanyahu and Trump were multivalent, multidirectional and available for use against each other.
The ambiguity in the meaning of Netanyahu’s gift to Trump reflected the contradictions in the convergence of these two leading humiliation entrepreneurs and their strategies. The coexistence of Netanyahu’s aggressive reiteration of the familiar victimization narrative with Trump’s narrative of the U.S. being victimized by exploitative and ungrateful allies and client states is a tense one. Above all, what “America first” means in the Trump imaginary is not only the reinvention of archaic idioms of territorial expansion and mercantilist economics, but the assertion of the American right to sovereign emotional expression. What most sparked Trump’s fury in his meeting with Zelenskyy was the Ukrainian president’s assertion that the U.S. would “feel” Russia’s “influence” soon enough. “Don’t tell us what we’re going to feel,” Trump inveighed. “You’re in no position to dictate what we’re going to feel,” he reiterated. “We’re going to feel very good.”
Power for Trump is inextricable from the ability to determine whose emotions mobilize opinion and spur action. In Trump’s eyes, he, as president of the United States, stands above Zelenskyy, and even above Netanyahu, in setting the rules of the game.
Sign up to our mailing list to receive our stories in your inbox.