What Makes Bullies, Like Trump, Vulnerable?

by | Oct 26, 2024 | Opinions & Commentary

Image: Rawpixel, iStockphoto

What Makes Bullies, Like Trump, Vulnerable?

by | Oct 26, 2024 | Opinions & Commentary

Image: Rawpixel, iStockphoto

What bullies and their allies fear the most: people actually looking directly at them and what they do—confronting them, and then standing their ground refusing to be intimidated.

Donald Trump has been repeatedly compared to a school-yard bully. And there really is no more accurate comparison. The mechanisms of intimidation and manipulation used by your garden-variety bully and Trump are almost identical—except of course for the scale.

Let’s take a look at a typical bully and his posse of sycophants. Bully’s always seem to have a group of weak fools around them to nod in agreement, amplify threats or run errands, often at their own expense. So far we have directly described Trump and the remnants of the Republican Party. Trump has recruited other fools and bullies by paralleling their messages. Meet the lowlifes of the KKK, Proud Boys, Patriot Front, the thousands of fools he goaded into invading the Capitol and more. Add to this the contingent of now disbarred and bankrupt attorneys doing his bidding—also at their own and very large expense.

The actions of schoolyard bullies center around threat and intimidation of others. This is aided by the ever-present posse. As the bully issues his threats he does so with the nodding agreement of his pet fools. The target leaves the area they seek to control because of the fear generated by this augmented threat. Maybe lunch money or some other valuable consideration is extracted first.

If this sounds similar to a Mafia protection racket, it should. On the receiving end of this, you are supposed to feel threat, danger and possible harm to your person. Same as any extortion or organized crime operation. You’re supposed to feel like the danger is all around you.

This is again demonstrated in the Trumpverse with public officials and others receiving threatening phone calls and emails with death threats to them and their families. No official whose job may call for opposing Trump in order to uphold the office holder’s oath of office is immune, from Members of Congress, Secretaries of State of various states to local offices—the story is the same. The bully’s posse is on patrol.

What are the bully and his posse trying to do? They are trying to make themselves impossible to confront, to create the impression that they are bigger than they really are, that they have greater numbers and influence than they really do. And therein lies their downfall.

What bullies and their allies fear the most is people actually looking directly at them and what they do—confronting them. They fear what people will find when they look. Of course this is why Trump hates the press, especially investigative reporters.

If we examine our lives we find that where we have been successful and overcome obstacles it is because we confronted them and dealt with them as they were, not with some assumption of how we imagined them. Situations and problems that are not fully confronted never really get handled.

But handling imaginary problems, situations or conspiracy theories sure generates a lot of useless activity, wasted resources and creates chaos. Which is what Trump is actually trying to do—so “only he can handle it.”

The funny thing about Trump is that in the larger scheme of things he imagines himself to be the top-dog bully with his pathetic posse of losers doing his bidding. And he thus labors under an illusion. Trump is merely a part of another loser posse working for much bigger bullies.

Fascism Is the Goal

The threat of fascism in the United States is not new. In 1940 industrialists were plotting a coup to replace Roosevelt with a dictator in the person of former Marine Major-General Smedley Darlington Butler. The plot fell apart when butler adhered to his oath to uphold the Constitution and exposed it—just like Mark Miley, John Kelley and others did under Trump.

Some of our modern-day billionaires and industrialists have the same ambition of installing a fascist government for reasons most likely associated with protecting or expanding their empires. We can add a few names here to call these actual bullies out: Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Charles Koch, Richard Uihlein, Harlan Crow are a few standout names. There are more. Add to this Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Food, the NRA and other interest groups who want an end to any regulation of their abusive and predatory practices.

With the publication of Project 2025, the arrogance and determination of this people is obvious. One of the primary funders of the Heritage Foundation which authored the plan is in the list above, Charles Koch. Peter Thiel financed JD Vance’s election to the Senate and Vance is joined at the hip to Project 2025. Elon of course lost the majority of $44 billion buying Twitter to turn it into his disinformation megaphone—he typically does not lose money, so take it for granted that he expects to make this up somewhere, probably at our collective expense.

There is one more bully that has to be mentioned that has made Trump part of his posse: Putin. Every damage Trump inflicts on the United States benefits Putin.

Solutions

As mentioned earlier in this piece, bullies hate and fear being confronted. Standing up to a bully, looking him in the eye and not backing down is something that he does not really expect. The next thing he does not expect is getting punched back in response to his attacks. This is where Biden failed and where Kamala Harris has succeeded beyond anyone’s expectation. Granted, Harris missed some opportunities in her confrontation with Trump to do even more damage. But his cowardly and contrived excuses for not having another tell the tale.

The key component of Harris’s success against Trump in their “debate” was confront. She never backed down, never flinched, never ceased to see Trump as he is: a loudmouth, blustering, crook, already convicted of 34 felonies and still indicted for a host others. She looked him straight in the eye and all the flinching was done by him.

And Trump has continued to flinch and bluster ever since. He’s been confronted. His intimidation of Harris failed. He and his little posse of losers have been complaining and making excuses ever since. The on-going Greek chorus of his racist, white supremacist, “profit at expense of the rest of us” fan base echoes the same hollow notes.

Now we are in the end game. The election is on-going, culminating November 5th. Millions have already voted. In my county, over twenty-five percent of voters registered have already voted. These numbers will expand radically over the next 10 days, ending with a nation glued to returns to find out if Democracy will stand up to the most well financed effort to erase it in history.

Each of us has to confront what is in front of us to gain any measure of success in our lives. Collectively we must confront the bullies arrayed against that success and stare them down in the voting booth.

You know what to do.

Marty Kassowitz

Marty Kassowitz

Marty Kassowitz is co-founder of Factkeepers. As founder of Interest Factory and View360, he brings more than 30 years experience in effective online communications, social media management, and platform development to the site. He is a writer, designer, editor and long time observer of the ill-logic demonstrated by too many members of the species known as Mankind. After a long history of somewhat private commentary on a subject he totally hates: politics, Marty was encouraged to build this site and put up his own analyses as well as curate relevant content from other sources.

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