By 1950, Margaret Truman, daughter of the president, had been singing for several years and was quite popular. Her radio debut, on the Ford Sunday Evening Hour in 1947, had attracted a record 15 million listeners, and the volume of congratulatory calls was so high that the White House switchboard had to temporarily shut down. It was followed by a performance at the Hollywood Bowl in front of 20,000, and a subsequent concert at the Syria Mosque auditorium, in Pittsburgh, that prompted nine curtain calls and three encores. In 1950, she embarked on another singing tour, this one culminating in a performance at Constitution Hall in our nation’s capital.
Not everyone was impressed.
Washington Post music critic Paul Hume wrote in his review that Truman “cannot sing very well.... is flat a good deal of the time.... has not improved in the years we have heard her.... still cannot sing with anything approaching professional finish.”
The day after the concert, President Harry S. Truman wrote a handwritten letter to Hume:
“I’ve just read your lousy review of Margaret’s concert.... It seems to me that you are a frustrated old man who wished he could have been successful.... Some day I hope to meet you. When that happens you will need a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes. ”
There was no fanfare, no press conference, no wash through the spin cycle of advisers and consultants. Truman scrawled it out on two pages of thin paper, addressed it himself, and put a stamp on it. The Washington Post called the 134 words “the most incendiary words ever written by an occupant of the Oval Office.”
Give ’em hell, Harry!
Nearly 75 years later, as the world has gone gooey and the modern male increasingly wallows in self-victimization, would any public official threaten to beat the hell out of someone, much less threaten to beat the hell out of someone in writing?
Instead, it’s become nonstop whininess and persecution that reminds me of a ditty we used to sing in childhood:
Nobody likes me
Everybody hates me
I think I’ll go eat worms.
The worm-eater-in-chief is Donald Trump, who, as Sidney Blumenthal put it in a column in The Guardian earlier this year, “has perfected the art of inverted victimhood.” According to Blumenthal, Trump repeats the same pattern, whether it’s the libel case brought against him by E. Jean Carroll, or paying hush money, or his defense in the four criminal trials against him, or accusations of sexual assault:
1. I don’t even know any of those accusing me, and Biden is a senile peckerwood.
2. I have done nothing wrong, and Biden is a senile peckerwood.
3. The ones accusing me are liars, cheats, and thieves, and Biden is a senile peckerwood.
4. I am a martyr, and Biden is a senile peckerwood.
There is a name for this—DARVO—as discovered and coined in the 1990s by Jennifer Freyd, a professor emerita of psychology at the University of Oregon. It’s an abbreviation for “Deny the behavior, attack the accuser, reverse the roles of victim and offender.”
Trump’s worm-eating has also opened up the floodgates for his base. “My whole life,” he has told them, “I’ve heard, ‘You’re innocent until proven guilty’, but now you’re guilty until proven innocent. That’s a very, very difficult standard.... It’s a very scary time for young men in America when you can be guilty of something that you may not be guilty of.”
Instead of taking responsibility for anything, Trump’s followers would much rather eat worms: My flat-screen doesn’t have 4K. The car I’m driving is already six months old and losing its new car smell although only bathing once a year probably doesn’t help. Somebody stole my Chia Pet. I have been deprived of my true calling, which is to be discovered on American Idol.
Then there is my favorite of all:
I can’t find a job because there are no jobs left in America.
Actually, there are millions of jobs available. Good jobs. High-paying jobs. As Oprah put it, “You are responsible for your life. You can’t keep blaming somebody else for your dysfunction. Life is really about moving on.”
The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates there are 8.8 million job openings in the United States. A program assistant for the Transportation Safety Administration can make $41,822, an administrative program specialist for the National Park Service $50,355, a food service worker at the Veterans Health Administration $28.61 an hour, and that is a tiny sample. There are teacher shortages, shortages in manufacturing, shortages in trucking.
Deny the behavior, attack the accuser, reverse the roles of victim and offender.
But why gain the skills to have a good job when you can sit in your La-Z-Boy and moan and bitch about the unfair horror of it all?
Wah wah wah.
Trump is not the only high-profile worm eater. Prince Harry acts as if he was raised by wolves instead of the royal family. His mantra is Nobody knows the troubles I’ve seen; the horror of it all; and the room I had at Kensington Palace growing up was smaller than William’s. His book, Spare, sold 3.2 million copies worldwide in the first week after it was published, in January 2023, but reviews were mixed. In a column in The Washington Examiner, Dan Hannan described it as a “prolonged whinge [the British word for “whine”] by a spiteful and self-pitying blockhead” and emblematic of “the victimhood worship that is fashionable.”
Kelly Osbourne, who admittedly will never be confused with Plato or even Carrot Top, called Prince Harry a “fucking twat” on a podcast, going on to say, “You were the prince of a goddamn country, who dressed up as a fucking Nazi, and now you’re trying to come back as the Pope? Suck it.”
Brett Kavanaugh, when he appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee during the confirmation process for the Supreme Court, went full worm eater, portraying himself as an aggrieved victim after being accused of sexual assault. Bill Clinton went full worm eater in the Monica Lewinsky affair when he claimed, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman,” discounting the blow jobs she gave him in the Oval Office as if they were variations on spin the bottle. Harvey Weinstein, through his lawyers, went full worm eater in his sexual-assault trials, as if it was the accuser who forced sex upon him and not the other way around.
What happened to manning up and owning up to your actions? What happened to showing strength instead of crying foul? Nobody expects anyone to admit guilt in a serious accusation, but how about just shutting up?
I am not a psychologist. I cannot precisely pinpoint why the phenomenon has taken hold. I think the #MeToo movement has had something to do with it, in which women said they were not going to take it anymore and men, feeling persecuted and vulnerable and unwanted after 2,000 years of gravy-train, authoritarian rule, ran for the hills. It has to do with the wellness hysteria, in which it is forbidden to utter sharp words to anyone. It has to do with our age of wokeness, in which the world is one big kumbaya and everybody sleeps with a baby bunny. Confrontation is out. Honestly expressing yourself is out. Saying what you actually believe is out.
The problem with victimization is that it is immensely satisfying. This I know from personal experience, my sessions with Penny the shrink, in which I luxuriate in self-pity for the first 20 minutes, blaming everyone and everything for my problems, my pitfalls, my screwups. My wife is to blame. My parents are to blame. My friend Ellen is to blame when, during my fifth-birthday party, she took the zebra-decorated place mat that was a gift to me and caused me to burst into tears and hide in the closet. My sister is to blame. My brother is to blame. (Actually, I don’t even have a brother, for which my parents are to blame). Absolving myself of all responsibility is cathartic, until even I realize what I have become:
A worm eater like the rest of ’em.
Buzz Bissinger is the author of Friday Night Lights and a co-author of Shooting Stars with LeBron James