What happens when one stands up to a bully?
In our nation’s capital, public servants who do their job without bending a knee to the Bully in Chief are fired or sued, the latter being the bully’s favorite form of attack. People who heap praise on the bully, even if they are woefully inadequate for the job, are hired.
“Those people,” he told his nephew, “the shape they’re in, all the expenses, maybe those kinds of people should just die.”
That, too, shouldn’t surprise us. We were warned about his admiration for Hitler. We’ve seen how he’s willing to turn people’s lives and the economy upside down to deport migrants, even those who are showing up at immigration hearings, people trying to do what it takes to have legal status. He has zero empathy, despite his statements this week about the starving people in Gaza. Perhaps he’s afraid that being an ally of Netanyahu is going to make him look bad. It’s always all about him.
Imagine believing that just because you said it, it has to be true. Forgive me if I keep bringing up the Sharpie incident, but what he did by firing the labor statistics expert whose data he didn’t like is exactly what he did in his first term when he refused to accept the weather experts’ forecasts.
Teddy Roosevelt gave us the term bully pulpit – bully being slang for wonderful. Roosevelt saw that he was in a position to talk to the American people, and the world. With facts and persuasion from the bully pulpit, he could affect change.
Now, we’ve lost the pulpit, and we’re left with the bully. We stand to lose a lot more, starting with our healthy economy and our civil rights, if members of the bully’s party don’t have the courage to stand up to him.
