Image by Gage Skidmore.
In bad times — and these are bad times — I call up the spirit of Willie.
Willie has seen me through cancer, divorce, and deaths in the family. His memory has given me the courage and strength to push on when I wanted to give up and hide. Willie reminds me that, even at 87, I can take it, get back up, survive, sometimes even win.
Willie was my bully. When I was 12, he beat me up or at least threatened to do so almost every day.
Trump is my bully now. Even though I share the misery he spreads with millions of others, it somehow seems personal because he makes me feel so vulnerable, so hopeless, so at the end of my version of the American dream. And, of course, everything he does evokes Willie.
I recognized each of them as bullies the first time we met. I was a journalist in my early forties, in the late 1970s, when I initially interviewed Donald Trump for CBS Sunday Morning. I took him for an amusing buffoon. He was around 35 then. Obviously lying to me, it was clear that he had a certain oily allure. People considered him harmless, a loser supported by his dad. He didn’t scare me. After Willie, few ever did. But even then the swagger was unmistakable, the flat-voiced, dead-eyed affect, the lack of humane connection. From that first moment, I knew he was a predator.
Enter Willie
At 12, I was terrified by Willie, who spotted me early in seventh grade as an after-school target. There I was, fat, meek, and lugging a heavy leather bookbag. In my junior high school’s permissive climate, some roughhousing was tolerated to let the bullies drain off energy and ease the teachers’ day. I was in a class for the “gifted,” identified by those bags full of books we carried from class to class (that were all too easily kicked out of our hands).
Maybe the principal, a growly old-school bully himself, thought we needed to be toughened up, since he allowed the harassment — as long as his own authority wasn’t challenged.
Willie never seriously hurt me. Once a week or so, there would be a little blood, a few bruises, maybe a pocket torn off my shirt. But the humiliation in front of my classmates especially the girls, proved crushing. I still remember it viscerally.
Of course, I was hardly the only victim in that school, but I seemed to be the only one with a designated bully on a regular schedule. I never complained or reported it because that seemed to me a form of giving in, surrender, letting Willie and the other bullies know that the torment had gotten to me. I always told myself: you can take it.
And then, one day, I couldn’t take it anymore. I have no idea why. It seemed like any other bully afternoon outside the school’s front doors. At 3 p.m., Willie swaggered up and gave me a preliminary shove. I stood my ground and talked back, trying not to sound whiney. Some of my classmates, relieved they weren’t involved, gathered to watch.
The Battle
Willie kicked my bookbag out of my hand. That hurt. He grabbed for my pocket. I tried to push his hand away and then, for the first time, I suddenly launched myself at him, a rotund rocket of repressed rage. We both went down on the gray sidewalk. Incredibly, I was on top.
I began beating his head. Writing this even now, some 75 years later, I smile, sit up, and feel stronger.
I jammed my pudgy knees into his chest until he gasped, grabbed handfuls of his greasy hair, and yanked until he started to scream. I screamed back, “I’m gonna kill you!” Then I began trying to bash his brains out.
My classmates cheered discreetly, the bullies clapped, and my teacher shouted, “Robert! You’ll hurt him!” What a thrill that was! It didn’t last long. A burly shop teacher peeled me off and laughed as he put a steel-tipped toe in my rear. The principal himself came over to get a better look. I could tell he was trying not to smile.
I didn’t become a school hero, the girls didn’t flock to me, and the bullies didn’t try to recruit me. Still, Willie avoided me after that, and no one ever bullied me again. There were moments in the years to come in school, on the street, even in newsrooms, when I sensed someone was about to symbolically kick me, but I like to think that my response — even if only a sharp word or my body language — left that fight in the world of my fantasies. I was always ready for Willie redux and I think it showed.
Another Kind of Bully
So here we are so many years later, surrounded by bullies (think, Elon Musk) so consumed by their psychoses, greed, cowardice, and outright madness for domination that they seem capable of becoming the ultimate bullies and destroying our world. No wonder so many of us feel vulnerable, hopeless, marooned at the butt end of this experiment in what once was but no longer is a liberal democracy.
The tale of Willie and me wasn’t simply a metaphor, of course; it was once my reality. Still, I cherish its metaphoric lessons in this moment. They keep me going. After all, the Trump era has felt all too much like a fever dream, a slow-motion train wreck leading us into a future that once seemed inconceivable. But we let it happen, didn’t we?
Who could have foreseen the rise of the new oligarchs, including Elon Musk and all those other billionaires? Well, don’t you remember the first time around — the robber barons of the nineteenth century?
The question is: How did everyday Americans become so ready for such a nightmarish change? How could they be seduced by a clown like Trump? Of course, American history offers its warnings. Remember how many were ready to follow Father Coughlin in the 1930s or Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. Still, neither of them ever became president.
Back in Willie’s day, the conventional wisdom was that bullies were basically cowards who would back down if you stood up to them. Even then, that wasn’t necessarily true, but as an explanation it served a purpose. In standing up to the bully and taking your lumps, you would learn that survival itself was a small victory that could lead to bigger ones. Perhaps even a full-scale victory someday.
A few years later, when bullies started packing guns, knives, and computers, the conventional wisdom became dangerous as well as wrong. By then, bullied kids returned with an automatic weapon and wiped out the cafeteria. A cycle of violence had been created.
And now we have this ur-bully in the White House again, who showed up and began suing people, firing them, arresting them. Some of the same pundits who never really believed in his staying power are now suggesting that we simply roll ourselves up and wait it out. You know, just keep your head down. It’s only four years, after all.
Well, consider that the worst advice possible. Donald Trump has loosed too many demons, already out of his control — from unhinged individuals just waiting for a voice to send them out into the night to vigilante militias awaiting a cause to give them purpose. They now think Trump has their backs (although he’s capable of turning on anyone). In his all-(un-)American world, there are no safe havens and no certainties. Those who think the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is Trump’s Mein Kampf had better be guarding against his version of the Reichstag fire that gave Adolph Hitler his critical boost. If you think chaos is assured, the next step may be to build a bunker or hop on a Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk interstellar rocket to Mars.
A New Mindset
My own feeling, though, is that the next step is to develop a new mindset.
Something like this: We are the guerillas in this war, the Yankee doodle irregulars who scandalized the British redcoats in 1776 by firing at them from behind trees. We’re the Viet Cong who planted poisoned bamboo spikes. Sound ugly? Perhaps you’d rather echo Michelle Obama’s “When they go low, we go high,” which certainly didn’t lead to victory in the 2016 presidential election. Get real. Going lower is merely a tactical decision. It doesn’t mean you’re giving up your principles, no less joining the other side.
Resistance begins with “embracing the suck” (old military slang for acknowledging the morass we’re in). Part of such an approach is understanding that, in opposing Trumpworld, you could get a torn pocket here, a lost job there, maybe even risky confrontations in the street. But without resistance, count on one thing: it will only get worse.
Old Bullies Beget New Ones
The bullies who clapped when I beat Willie are the progenitors of the unruly mob of blue-collar losers and white-collar wonks, proud thugs and Heritage Foundation nerds who, 60 years later, showed up at Trump rallies. By the time Donald sprung from jail those of them convicted of trashing the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, it was clear that they had always been the enemy. In Willie’s time, while we were afraid of them, we also considered ourselves superior to them and that smug, elitist view only grew.
Now, we find ourselves the asymmetrical warriors, the underdogs.
What about those classmates who watched Willie and me? They never tried to rescue me. I never found out what went through their minds when the worm finally turned. Did it make them ashamed or make them fight back against their own bullies?
The equivalent of those classmates, the bystanders of our moment, are the lost souls in this battle. They grew up to be the Democrats who fought among themselves for ideological bragging rights, or the Republicans who gave in, followed the money and power, voted the bastards in, and now hide behind them. They have functionally become bullies, too.
And Willie? The time has passed to empathize, play shrink, understand an unhappy boy. To hell with him and Donald Trump, too. We’ve certainly read enough about his troubled childhood, nasty dad, cold family. The question now is: What do we do before he does us all in?
Three Things to Do
First, shut up and listen.
In retrospect, it’s easy enough to see how the shrewd, disciplined plotters, before and during the Trump years, stocked the judiciary and the state legislatures, the school boards and town councils with radical right-wingers. And it’s no less easy to point out that the rising prices that disrupted the lives of the working and middle classes made Trump seem like an all too viable option for so many of us. All that should have been as clear as after-school bullying. But it didn’t seem to alarm enough of the media and so many of the political bystanders who looked down on the bullies and the bullied and thought they were safe.
If you want to keep ahead of the nightmare to come, you better pay attention now. Better follow Truth Social and not just MSNBC. Better listen to Steve Bannon and not just Rachel Maddow. Bannon’s term “muzzle velocity” explains why we’re having a hard time keeping up with the firehose of grim ideas, lies, deceptions, and mad directives the Trumpists are heaving out right now to overwhelm and confuse us all.
If we knock off the whining and chattering among ourselves and listen carefully to our enemies, we might be able to figure out just what they’re doing and prioritize just how we need to respond.
Second, never shut up.
Don’t mistake that as a cancellation of the first point. It means that this is the time to report the bullies and complain — to do, in other words, exactly what I didn’t do back in junior high school. We need to keep calling and writing our legislators, showing up at the local town council and school board meetings, while making our opinions clear in voicemails, e-mails, and letters to the editor. We need to keep up the pressure. Most people serving Trump just want to hold onto their gigs. Let them know that they could lose them when the resistance steps up if they don’t start responding to us now.
Don’t ever pass up voting again. How many of the bullied in the Trumpian era were among the misguided whose unused ballots provided him with his heartbreakingly narrow victory?
Support local media outlets and create new ones. The weakening of major newspaper and broadcasting sites has been a shocking development of these years and an indicator of how oligarchic media entities have been co-opted. When the Times pushed columnist Paul Krugman out the door, they lost some trust. Jim Acosta’s parting words as he walked the plank at CNN (“Don’t give into the lies. Don’t give into the fear. Hold onto the truth and to hope.”) sounded brave but sadly desperate.
Never shut up on environmental issues. It’s a priority to rally around the Earth in the “drill, baby, drill” era of Donald Trump. Many issues are local and coverage is accessible.
Third, above all else support the bullied.
I sometimes still fantasize about my classmates rushing forward, knocking Willie down with their book bags, and saving me. I wonder if that’s our only hope now.
The bullies have a public list of whom they’re coming after and if you’re not on it yet, you’re likely to be in some fashion sooner or later — unless you become one of them. Even then, don’t count on that lasting forever.
Some “sanctuary cities” have already stepped up and declared that they won’t allow their police forces to support ICE in the deportation of undocumented workers. There are major corporations that have refused to disband their Diversity-Equity-Inclusion units and the rights of their gay, trans, ethnic, and racial minority workers. Universities are cranking up to defend against a renewed assault on academic freedom. Obviously, we need to support them and new movements of every sort.
We also need the kind of awakening that right-wing pundit Peggy Noonan seemed to doubt could happen in a recent Wall Street Journal column when she wrote, “With luck this battle will last no more than four years, but we can’t count on the return of shame and decency, the resurrection of the Democratic party, and the emergence of the kind of leadership we need.”
Not on its own we can’t. The return of shame and decency to people who seem historically to have them in short supply sounds improbable. It’s a nice notion. Better we concentrate on growing the grit and smarts to fight back from the hedgerows to the dark net. We can beat Willie and Donald, but only if we do it together.
This piece first appeared in TomDispatch.
