“It’s horrible what I went through,” Bill O’Reilly said after he lost his job at Fox News in the wake of revelations that he and the company had spent tens of millions of dollars to settle multiple sexual harassment allegations against him.

The most powerful human in the world is the biggest victim in the world. “There’s never been a time in the history of our country where somebody was so mistreated as I have been,” President Trump told George Stephanopoulos. “No president should ever have to go through this again,” he said at his campaign launch rally in Florida Tuesday night.

Conservatives used to decry the culture of victimhood. Now they take delight in their oppression. Victimhood, after all, confers certain privileges: sympathy, special treatment, and moral license. As Charlie Sykes observed in his 1992 book A Nation of Victims, victims not only exculpate themselves from blame, but they also get to project guilt onto others. Back then, victims were minorities, women, the poor, the unemployed, and the disabled. The definition of “victim” now includes rich and powerful white men who feel sorry for themselves. In today’s America, all you have to do to be a victim is to act like one.