In the decades since, appropriating victimhood and marginalization has grown central to the Republican Party’s strategy. Sarah Palin routinely chastised the left—and the “lamestream media”—in 2008 for besmirching her family, even as she used them to buttress her campaign for vice president. Similarly, in 2012, Newt Gingrich surged to an unexpected victory in the South Carolina presidential primary after berating CNN’s John King for opening a GOP debate with a question about allegations that Gingrich had asked his first wife for an open marriage. “I think the destructive, vicious, negative nature of much of the news media makes it harder to govern this country, harder to attract decent people to run for public office,” Gingrich said to thunderous applause. “And I am appalled that you would begin a presidential debate on a topic like that.” With the audience firmly behind him, Gingrich continued to scold King. “I am tired of the elite media protecting Barack Obama by attacking Republicans,” he concluded.

As a candidate, Trump took Gingrich’s ploy even further, engaging in a protracted feud with Megyn Kelly and Fox News during the campaign. In September 2015, Trump announced that he was boycotting all Fox shows because, he said, the broadcaster “has been treating me very unfairly.” Last January, Trump withdrew from a Fox News debate because Kelly was moderating. Not even the most conservative of channels had his back, he suggested—a proposition that likely endeared him to voters who felt that no one had theirs. It is a technique that Trump had perfected decades before when he cast himself as a hardscrabble Queens developer, unwelcome in Manhattan’s inner circles. In The Art of the Deal, he claimed that he had to talk his way into a posh club, because no one knew his name. And even after he built Trump Tower, he still protested that he had been treated “unfairly” by the city, which had, he claimed, denied him a tax break that he was owed. Despite his wealth and his many “friends,” it was this fiction that he was an outsider that allowed him to address America’s “ignored, neglected, and abandoned” during his campaign, telling them, as he did when accepting the GOP nomination, “I am your voice.” Like them, he claimed, he was out of touch with Washington, and that was a good thing.

What’s striking about Trump, however, is that he’s maintained this position even as he’s assumed the most powerful office in the world. When the rapper Snoop Dogg released a music video in which he pulls a prop gun on a clown-masked stand-in for the president, Trump put on a show of appalled horror, as if he’d really been threatened by the entertainer. After the GOP’s American Health Care Act failed, he sought to blame everyone but himself. And months into his presidency, he has continued to suggest that Hillary Clinton was guilty of collusion with Russia. This is the Trumpian theater of helplessness, the pose of a prince pretending he was a pauper all along.

It’s difficult to overstate how strange Trump’s act is. Once in office, most politicians typically turn to the serious responsibility of governing the country, accepting that they are now in charge. This is particularly true of presidents. “The buck stops here,” was Harry Truman’s famous phrase. “I’m the decider,” was George W. Bush’s. Trump is remarkable for the extent to which he has avoided taking responsibility for anything, insistent on his own powerlessness. Forever raging against imaginary foes and complaining about persecution, he might have the most unpresidential motto in history: It’s not my fault.