For years, mental health professionals have argued that President Donald Trump’s behaviors, which some have called “malignant narcissism,” are a detriment to the nation.

Much has been written about the president’s tendency to gaslight ― a form of psychological manipulation weaponized by narcissists to make victims question their own reality, memory and perceptions.

Most recently, some have said that Trump has tried to gaslight the American people into believing that there is no real affordability crisis (he’s called it a “hoax” cooked up by the Democrats), despite widespread concerns about the rising cost of living and his running on a platform heavily focused on bringing down prices. (In spite of that, energy bills have increased as much as 13% since Trump took office.)

But psychologists say there’s another classic narcissist tactic that Trump appears to employ with alarming frequency that’s less talked about: DARVO: Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender.

DARVO is a manipulative tactic often used by narcissistic abusers to evade accountability: They deny the abuse, attack the person confronting them and then reverse the roles to portray themselves as the victim. And because most of us are unfamiliar with DARVO, we’re not well equipped to counter the tactic.

Jennifer Freyd, a pioneer in the field of trauma psychology who coined DARVO, said it’s a strategy that Trump and his team have weaponized for years to distort reality.

In an opinion piece that ran in The Hill last spring, she and her co-researcher pointed to how Trump made the case for imposing steep tariffs on other countries by arguing that it was America that had been humiliated and exploited by foreign nations (both critics and friendly trade partners) for decades.

Whether he knows the term or not, Trump is well versed in DARVO, Freyd wrote: It’s helped him to discredit women who’ve accused him of sexual assault, deflect blame during “Signalgate,” and blame Ukraine for Russia’s invasion.

“Because DARVO has been a central strategy in Trump’s political playbook for years, it has undoubtedly contributed to distorted perceptions of what is true and what is ‘fake news,’” her op-ed read. “When leaders like Trump weaponize DARVO, the public becomes more disengaged and confused.”

For some people ― namely narcissists ― acknowledging wrongdoing threatens their sense of power or control and brings them closer to facing accountability for harmful conduct. In a bind ― when they’re being forced to take responsibility ― the DARVO user cleverly shifts attention away from their original wrongdoing, said Sarah Harsey, an assistant professor of psychology at Oregon State University-Cascades and the co-author of the Hill op-ed.

“This technique injects a misleading or fictitious counter-narrative that can be compelling for people to believe. It can also be confusing: Who’s telling the truth, what really happened?” Harsey told HuffPost.

DARVO is a tactic often used by sexual abusers to deflect accountability by reversing the roles of victim and offender, she added. Harsey and Freyd’s research shows that DARVO is associated with higher rates of sexual harassment perpetration and greater acceptance of rape myths.

But run-of-the-mill narcissists use it, too, because of how effective it is: The person employing DARVO doesn’t need to convince everyone that the counter-narrative they’re offering is true, Harsey said. They just need to muddy the waters enough that people feel the truth is hard to determine.

DARVO puts the other person ― the real victim ― on the defensive and makes them feel like they need to explain themselves, defend themselves or question themselves, said Avigail Lev, a psychologist in San Francisco.

Lev offered an everyday example to show how convincing DARVO can be: Imagine a spouse is confronting their partner about why they’re home so late. The DARVO-using spouse will deny it and attack their partner, saying something like, “Why are you so insecure? We never agreed that I had to be home at 10 p.m. That didn’t happen. You’re so jealous.”

In doing so, the deflecting spouse discredits their partner and flips the situation, allowing them to claim the moral high ground while leaving their partner confused, Lev said.

“They become the victim,” she said. “This allows the actual perpetrator to continue harmful behavior while still feeling justified, because they now see themselves as wronged or victimized.”

As Freyd and Harsey wrote in The Hill, Trump has been using DARVO from the start.

“Even before his inauguration in 2017, he said that the voice heard in the infamous ‘Access Hollywood’ tape wasn’t his,” Harsey told HuffPost.

A few years later, she said, “he used DARVO against E. Jean Carroll, who described being sexually assaulted by Trump in her memoir. He denied ever meeting her, he made repeated attacks against her, like calling her a ‘nut job’ and a ‘whack job,’ and, in Carroll’s defamation case against him, he argued he was the victim of a ‘witch hunt.’”

Harsey thinks DARVO is harmful when any government official uses it. She pointed to how former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo used it when confronted with sexual harassment allegations, denying he’d harassed anyone and calling himself a victim of “cancel culture.”

But Trump’s use of it is “exceptionally blatant,” the professor said. He consistently denies, attacks and plays the victim, almost to an absurd degree, she said.

And it appears he’s enabled those in his inner circle to follow suit: Harsey pointed to how Vice President JD Vance used DARVO pretty unabashedly in January when talking about Renée Good and Alex Pretti, two Minneapolis residents who were killed by federal agents amid protests over the administration’s aggressive crackdown on immigration. Vance called Good a “domestic terrorist” and reposted a social media post that described Pretti as an “assassin.”

Just a few weeks ago, Attorney General Pam Bondi extensively used DARVO tactics during her House Judiciary Committee hearing, Harsey said.

“She seems to have favored the ‘attack’ aspect of DARVO, given the way she repeatedly insulted the lawmakers questioning her,” Harsey said. “There are ways the president and his officials could refute claims without using DARVO, yet they choose this tactic that inflicts as much harm as possible.”

Harsey believes Trump continues to use DARVO, whether he knows about the term or not, because it’s been an effective tool in helping him dodge consequences.

“What accountability has he actually faced? There have been just enough people who have uncritically accepted his DARVO as truth, which has helped sustain his political career,” she said.

One way to fight back against DARVO is to simply understand that it is a manipulative tactic and to learn how to recognize it when it happens, Harsey said.

“Because DARVO follows a predictable pattern (deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender), it becomes fairly easy to spot when it’s used,” she explained. “We’ve conducted research that shows how educating people about DARVO renders it a little less convincing.”

To defend yourself against DARVO in the moment, it’s important to name the manipulative strategy and label the behavior when it’s occurring.

But for Americans experiencing DARVO from the president, the obvious dilemma is that they’re not in direct conversation with him. Normally you can hold firm to facts and call them out rather than engaging in defensive arguments.

“If you were calling someone out directly for DARVO in a personal interaction, the response would look very different than when an entire society is experiencing it from a political leader,” Lev said.

Some of us do have some power, though. Reporters in the White House press corps should ― and sometimes do ― call it out directly: Look at how CNN’s Kaitlan Collins called out press secretary Karoline Leavitt last week, when the latter claimed the reporter was mischaracterizing something Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had said. Calmly, Collins read Hegseth’s quote back verbatim.

When we experience DARVO collectively, our role is to continue speaking the truth and articulating facts so that we’re not further gaslit and can maintain some shared understanding of reality, Lev said.

At the same time, the psychologist thinks we should be cautious about getting pulled into identity politics and instead focus more on cultivating critical and discerning thinking.

“This allows people to examine the facts and form their own values-based opinions grounded in their moral judgments, rather than simply adopting what one side tells them they should believe,” she said.

Once you’re able to spot DARVO, it’s important to help others recognize instances of it, too.

“We should encourage people to use critical thinking and deductive reasoning and to notice cognitive distortions and manipulations so that we can maintain a shared sense of reality rather than falling for propaganda,” she said.

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