All Bully; No Pulpit

Apocalypse now. 
It was President Teddy Roosevelt who coined the phrase "Bully Pulpit" to describe the Oval Office as a powerful platform for launching important messages to the nation. At the time the word bully, one of Roosevelt’s favorite buzzwords, did not quite have the meaning it has today. When TR said, “Bully…bully” he meant outstanding. And of course his use of pulpit wasn’t strictly denotative because he didn’t mean messages of a religious nature. Like so much else in the Trump Era, Bully Pulpit has pretty much been turned on its head. Any claim that messages emanating from the current occupant of the Oval Office “pulpit” have anything to do with morality, virtue, honor, decency or any of the other ethical concerns of theology is just perverse:
It’s not that we’ve never heard such rank hypocrisy spew forth from a pulpit before, but it seems particularly galling coming from a gold-plated phony who’s made multiple, spectacularly public “mistakes” in his failed marriages, businesses, and legal entanglements. If not exactly sympathy and compassion, he continues to be the recipient of an endless flow of indulgence from his para-religious base, so in that sick sense one could concede that the Trump Oval Office is still a bit pulpity.As to the bully part of TR’s formulation, this is where things really get twisted. Trump is fully invested in the contemporary meaning of the word, as in “a person who uses strength or power to harm or intimidate those who are weaker.” This is manifest in the way he constantly uses schoolyard taunts while safely surrounded by armed security and thousands of supporters, like this one from his recent rally in Duluth:

"Goodbye, darling," Trump said as law enforcement escorted the person out of the arena. "We have a single protester. He's going home to his mom. Say 'hi' to Mommy. Was that a man or a woman, because he needs a haircut more than I do. I couldn't tell.”

It’s manifest in his simpatico for other bullies in the world, such as Putin (“has great control over his country”), Kim Jong-un (“the strong head of the country”) Duterte ("doing a great job").And then of course his bullying is manifest in his policies, none more thuggish than his recent attempt to intimidate refugees the world over by separating the families of recent arrivals at America’s borders who were seeking asylum from oppressive conditions elsewhere. Another hallmark of the bully is how they react when someone stands up to them, and in that regard Trump was win full display as the classic bully he is this week. He denied doing what he was caught doing. Then he whined that it wasn’t his fault. And then he pointed fingers at others and asked why no one was picking on them. And finally--with his gang of bully worshippers in Duluth cheering him on--he started talking tough again. It was like a week of having a reality cam pointed at a 14-year old who steals lunch money from grade schoolers.It is a tenet of The Nob that people generally hate politics…and not without reason…and not without dire consequences. So as much as the word fascism gets thrown around these days, I suspect that most people really don’t have a firm grasp of what fascism is. To help remediate this gap in civic education, here's as clear and elementary a definition as you can ask for: Fascism is what happens when a bully--without compassion or other empathetic virtues-- takes over your country.