Untangle this

It was Rachel Maddow, I believe, who said this last night (3/4/19):
“He was being dangled a pardon.” The sense, of course, was that a pardon was being dangled in front of him, an offer; but the switching of the object of ‘dangle’ from ‘a pardon’ to ‘he’ and then transformed into a passive is a twisting of grammar/syntax that does occur and sometimes becomes the norm in a language or at least a marked form, not “unEnglish” or “unKorean” or whatever.
So, there is a name for this sort of thing. I read about it recently but cannot remember where (price of reading too many books at once, not to mention items on the internet). So if anyone can attach a name to this, please register it in “comments” on this blog.
p.s. you can save your political comments for another blog, but I do understand your dislike of Rachel since she is a big factor in pulling our country back from fascism.

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