The Bully in the Pulpit 

                It’s common place to talk about presidents using the “Bully Pulpit” to drive their agenda or promote their ideology.  Now we have a president that really doesn’t have an agenda or ideology.  Now we have a president who is a common bully.  Like all bullies, he sucks all of the air out of the room and wants all attention focused on him and what terrible thing he might do next.  If you cross him, he attacks, throwing tantrums and signing more ‘executive orders’ to let us all know that he’s in charge.

                We’ve reached the point in this presidency where any hint of responsible governance is gone.  He’s like a toddler sent to his room for behaving badly who decides to tear the room apart as revenge.  The ACA or DACA, it doesn’t matter.  As long as Obama did it, he wants to destroy it.  It doesn’t matter that he is hurting real Americans with these tantrums, he just wants to lash out in anger.  It doesn’t matter to him that the states he carried and the people that voted for him will be the ones suffering the most because of his actions.  He just wants to show he’s tough.  While the people of Puerto Rico face months of danger from disease and famine, he threatens to cut off aid.  It’s an open question whether or not he even knows they are citizens.  He lies about (you really could put just about anything in this space) his tax plan helping middle class or working families while orchestrating a huge give away to himself.  None of it matters to the bully as long as the cameras roll and the attention continues.

                The cowards and traitors who run what’s left of the Republican party are afraid of the bully, too.  They pander to his whims in the hopes that he might sign some God forsaken piece of legislation they haven’t even read yet, some small trophy they can waive in front of the Koch brothers claiming to have done what daddy wanted.  They don’t care that the bully is edging us toward a conflict on the Korean peninsula that, if it turns nuclear, could kill at least 40 million people.  All they want is one last tax break for the petro- barons and a way to persecute people they don’t like.  They are willing to ignore the damage the bully does to the constitution every day.  They will do nothing to stop the bully.

                No matter how bad any of us thought it would be, it’s worse.  The magnitude of the bully’s depravity is overwhelming and all-encompassing.  Normally, we would proceed a policy or an issue at a time, but the bully doesn’t know anything about policy or issues, all he knows about is power and destruction.  He puts his own staff in the position of denying what he says because it’s so crazy.  He’s only in it for the attention he gets – and, of course, the money.  He has tapped a dark, sick spot of the American psyche and the pain is only just beginning.  He couldn’t have done this by himself, he’s to venial and stupid to have thought it through this far.  This won’t be fixed by voting for Democrats (although I encourage you to do so).  This probably won’t be fixed by politics. 

                I think we’ve come to the point where this can no longer just be patched back together with laws and policy.  I think we’ve come to the point that in order to move forward we have to reconnect with the people around us, even the ones we disagree with, even the ones we don’t like and who probably don’t like us, even the ones who voted for the bully. The bully needs to divide us.  He needs us to hate people who exercise their right of free speech to protest.  But he also benefits when we hate the people who hate the protesters.  Giving in to the anger is helping the bully win.  It is, as Springsteen sang, “gonna be a long walk home.”  We can protest and resist, but we also have to figure out just what it is we stand for.  What is the bigger narrative that makes us brothers and sisters even if we don’t agree about everything.  Purity is the enemy of solidarity.  Maybe, it’s as simple as the old line from a Dylan song, “I’ll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours.”