What the perpetually aggrieved mean by "winning"

I couldn’t help but think about her when I heard from an enraged Trump supporter who was displeased with my characterization of Trump’s stance on immigration, i.e., that on this or any other issue he will say literally anything at any moment if he believes that it will advance his interests. The Trumpkin did not believe that I was wrong in that characterization, but that I am hypocritical: “What about you?” he demanded. “You don’t say whatever advances your interests?”

The implicit belief expressed by those sentences is the creed of losers everywhere: No one has any principles, no one tries to do the right thing, no one tries to uphold any standards of conduct — everyone is only in it to win, to get what he wants. It isn’t that the world does not provide some evidence supporting that view, but it also provides evidence for the contrary view.

Bill Clinton was, so far as I can tell, the first American president who was actively admired for his dishonesty. Democrats — and not only they — loved to bask in Slick Willie’s cleverness, to watch him get himself into jams and get himself out again, making his opponents look like fools. Of course he betrayed his family, his supporters, and the country that entrusted him with the highest office in the land — but he won! This is what is going on in the mind of Donald Trump when he praises Vladimir Putin: Sure, he’s a brute, but look at those poll numbers. That is why in the minds of his admirers, anything Trump does can be spun into gold. “Winning!”

They celebrate in Trump what progressives saw in Bill Clinton: a cudgel with which to bludgeon one’s enemies, real or perceived, though I expect that “winning” as its own justification is going to look a lot less persuasive to the Right come November. Principles, standards of personal conduct, moral codes, honor — from that point of view, these are only participation trophies for the insufficiently ruthless. That this attitude should prevail so strongly among the world’s losers — the aggrieved, those who lament, endlessly, that the deck is stacked against them and their kind — constitutes a kind of inverted Nietzschean ethic, not that this would ever occur to them.