When I was in high school, there was a bully with more muscles than brains named Tippy. He had a small gang of fawning acolytes who, emboldened by his company, enjoyed ambushing smaller kids, taunting and pushing them around.
I hadn’t thought of Tippy in decades until Feb. 28 when a couple of thugs played the same ugly game on TV, ambushing a man smaller in size but way larger than both of them in courage and integrity.
Clearly choreographed, it was played out before an invited ring of subservient onlookers, complete with a lesser thug, reporter Brian Glen, who pitched in: “Why don’t you wear a suit?” (Would he have asked the same inane question of Elon Musk, I wonder.)
Trump’s verdict on the performance — “It’s gonna be great television” — was, in a way, true since it immediately raised Zelensky’s already heroic stature around the world, especially in Ukraine.
What it was most likely meant to demonstrate for Trump’s American audience was the unpredictability of his implacable wrath.
But it also raises the question, does Trump even recognize a genuine hero? After all, he referred to the more than 1,800 Marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed for their country. “Why should I go to their cemetery?” he asked. “It’s filled with losers.”
Trump is a terrible role model, especially for teens. What are they to think when a spectacle commonly found on the streets and in school playgrounds shows up in the Oval Office? It’s notable how frequently Trump’s recent address to Congress included the word “dominate” and its cognates (dominance, domination, etc.) That certainly resonates with the program of Project 2025, which would replace the Founders’ inspired vision of a balance of powers with a dominant executive, an autocrat.
This would-be autocrat is also a con artist. So, it’s worth keeping in mind that a con artist feels nothing but contempt for the people he cons. They are, after all, losers, happily imprisoned in his fake world. As Stephanie Graham, his former press secretary reported, one of the terms he uses for his adoring fans is “basement dwellers.”
But surely his greatest contempt is for those he hasn’t conned, but who are so afraid of him they’re willing to grovel. These are the Republican legislators who have given up on democracy and do exactly what he wants them to do.
That leaves the people he actually fears — the people who are neither conned nor willing to grovel. They still believe in democracy and are determined to make it work again.
These are the people we need. May they keep the faith.