We’re all familiar with the schoolyard bully. We either grew up knowing one, willingly or not, or we’ve seen their characters played out in films like Back to the Future I, II & III, Carrie, Bad Reputation, Accepted and hundreds more with bullying themes. Many of them terrifying.
If, after watching Trump’s meltdown in the Oval office scolding the democratically-elected leader of Ukraine and his follow up State of Union name-shaming everyone he’s ever disliked in his political career, you find yourself convinced that he was the “political colossus of our time and our nation” as Trump’s Rapid Response videos cast him as, then stop and take a closer look.
Trump has all the earmarks of the school yard bully-type and has been for most of his life. It’s no coincidence either that all authoritarian leaders are bullies and Trump has a special relationship with one of the worst in Vladimir Putin. The State of the Union Speech was very short on fact or serious policy initiatives and more of a cavalcade of Trump’s wildest codswallop ideas of which Joe Biden more mercifully referred to them as, “malarkey".
What leads me to view Trump is farthest thing from a serious leader that has the best interest of the voters at heart? If one cannot seriously see the forest for the trees, let’s just cite one recent example to give legs to this claim. Great leaders (which trump wants so desperately for us to see him as) are level headed and don’t allow critics to rattle them in public. They don’t engage in petty slurs that are meant to demean and dehumanize people. They unite people under common causes as opposed to divisive tactics meant to find commonality with only those who also may suffer from low self-esteem.
Trump is the antitheses of great leadership. He constantly demonstrates publicly four of the five most common personality traits of bullies, as noted by the staff expertise at Neurolaunach, the website that provides “high-quality information about all things related to psychology, human brain function, and behavior.” The one that isn’t so obvious but records show likely exist, is his low self-esteem. A condition rendered out of his father’s assessment of “losers”, that drove Donald to act out in every way to show he was no loser.
In her Book, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man,” Mary Trump, Donald’s niece, who grew up around the man that essentially ignored his youngest son most of his early life. “When he [did] receive his father’s attention, his father constantly yelled at, criticized or punished him.”
Dictators thrive when there is chaos, which often they deliberately effect and claim “Only I can fix it”. To claim that the Biden Economic policies were “an economic nightmare” at his SOTU speech, was not only ludicrous but an excellent example of how dictators lie to create doubt among those earnestly looking for a father figure/strongman to ease their own fears that they have cultivated over the years.
The threat of fear and chaos are tools of fascists authoritarians that lead poorly informed people to make choices, that when fulfilled, are hard to come back from. If we could go back in time to 1945 and ask those people in Germany and Italy if their choices for leadership were a tragic mistake, odds are that most of them would shamefully concede
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.” - Mark Twain
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