If you follow the news at all, and I would hazard that this is true regardless of what country you live in, you have probably seen footage of the oval office meeting between the presidents of the United States and Ukraine. Most of the press coverage refers to it as a “heated” or “confrontational” meeting. What I saw, however, was not an argument but a group of men pleased with their newfound political power gleefully bullying the head of state of a smaller country. You want to tell the school yard bullies to go sit in a corner, but you can’t because the room is an oval.
If you are looking for commentary on what this means for world politics there are many other places you can find this. I just wanted to circle back to an article I wrote in December on bullies and nerds. I made the case that for a lot of people the decision of who to vote for came down to a sense of whether it would be better to put the nerds or the bullies in charge. Slightly more of the people who voted chose the bully. What they thought backing the bully would get them surely differs from voter to voter*, but now the world is dealing with what Anne Applebaum at the Atlantic calls The Rise of the Brutal American.
Incidentally, while we’re on the subject, I made these charts back in December because I got tired of people talking about the “majority of Americans” who voted for Trump and speculating on what that meant “the American people” were saying. This is what it looks like when you make a pie chart of who voters selected for president on their ballots. The undervotes are people who submitted a ballot and voted in other races but left the president blank.
It’s pretty close, right? But Trump got a bit more of the vote. So he wins. This, however, is not the same as saying “half of the country” voted for Trump. This is what it looks like when you add in the people who were eligible to vote, but did not.
Didn’t bother to vote was the clear winner of the election. Put another way 69% of the American people did not choose Trump in the last election. In terms of who gets to be president, it makes no difference. But I do think it matters when pundits start trying to draw conclusions about “the American people” and what they value.
That was all an aside, but it’s been bugging me. Anyway, we were talking about bullies. It is clear over the past month that the president and his main campaign donor have been having a great time issuing orders and intimidating immigrants, academics, minorities and federal workers. Musk’s “move fast and break things” approach now extends to cancer research, air traffic control and nuclear safety. Often moving fast means having to back track and trying to rehire workers who were fired because it turns out their work is kind of important. In other cases, governors from red states take their appeals to the president asking for exemptions.
It is all confusing and chaotic if you are looking at it from the point of view of running a functioning government, let alone a functioning democracy. But if you look at it as an opportunity for the president and his campaign donor to be seen as exerting power over others in a dramatically macho fashion then it is highly effective.
Going back to my original article on bullying, I quoted Tony Volk, a specialist in bullying at Brock University. Bullying, he says, is an attempt by a stronger individual to cause harm to a weaker one in order to gain status. “It’s got to be goal directed,” Volk said, “It’s got to be something that causes harm, so it can’t be a meaningless thing. And most importantly, it has to happen in a context where the victim has a hard time defending themselves.”
If your goal was to make things more efficient, rather than to make a big show of strength against “the deep state” or some such thing, then you would not start cutting indiscriminately nor would you do things to make workers fearful and miserable. Serious companies know, as Clay Halton wrote in Investopedia last May: “…downsizing can have adverse long-term consequences that some companies never recover from. Downsizing may actually increase the likelihood of bankruptcy by reducing productivity, customer satisfaction, and morale. Firms that have downsized are much more likely to declare bankruptcy in the future, irrespective of their financial health. Losing employees with valuable institutional knowledge can reduce innovation… which can negate any theoretical gain in productivity. Losing trust in management inevitably results in less engagement and loyalty. Because severe long-term consequences can outweigh any short-term gains, many companies are wary of downsizing, and often take a gentler approach.”
There is a reason CEOs don’t hold a celebration and come out laughing and wielding chain saws when they announce big layoffs. In every layoff I have seen, the company brings in experts to try to maintain morale and to make fired workers feel as good as they can under the circumstances. They offer severance packages and thank the workers for their service.
But treating laid off workers with compassion and respect is not useful to a bully. Remember, the point is intimidation. The action has to cause harm. Instead of thanking workers DOGE includes boilerplate in the emails it sends to fire people falsely claiming that they were let go because their performance was poor. Just a soupcon of insult to injury.
There is nothing efficient about having 3 million or so federal workers spend time writing up bullet points of their accomplishments each week, nor is it efficient to have people on the DOGE end try to process that information. Efficiency is not the point. The point is to say, “We are watching you, and you’re on thin ice. You should fear us.”
This brings me back to Zalensky. Remember that bullies pick on people they perceive of as weaker. They do not punch up. Trump repeatedly said to Zalensky that he was “in a bad position” and did not hold any cards. In a person with empathy, this would be a reason to offer help. To a bully, it is a reason to start attacking. This person can’t do anything for you except serve as a punching bag.
As Volk said, “If you take the belief that you’re better than other people, you deserve more than other people, and you’re willing to act on that belief, then that sets you up for saying [to your victim], ‘Sorry, this is the way the world works. It’s dog eat dog, nothing personal. But I’m better than you, and I’m going to show people it. And if you weren’t such a crappy kid, or it’s stupid, slow, ugly, you know, no friends, then this wouldn’t be happening to you.’”
That was exactly the position Trump and his cheering section took towards the leader of a smaller nation. During the meeting J. D. Vance and some of the members of the loyalist press corps had an opportunity to get in on the bullying fun. In a normal meeting on international affairs, world leaders discuss the fine points behind closed doors. It is ironic that Vance accused Zalensky of propaganda when it was the White House that was performing for the cameras. Bullying, as I noted in my previous article, requires an audience.
That is why quietly deporting illegal immigrants is not an option and the administration instead wanted to send a message by transporting them in military planes that cost five times what it would have to shuttle them in first class. Do you see how tough they are?
Elon Musk reportedly dehumanizes people who disagree with him by referring to them as non-player characters, a term from the gaming world for the computer generated characters who have no free will and exist only to populate the game for the actual players. They are not real and not deserving of compassion. In fact, Musk believes that empathy is weakness. He told Joe Rogan: “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit. “They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.”
I am not going to counter this with an argument that empathy is not weakness, it is strength. I am tired of having to frame everything as if the most important values were strength and power. Love makes you vulnerable, it is true. And it also makes you a good human being.
Why are so many people attracted to the bullies? Why do they want to be on their side? I have to assume they think that they are aligning themselves with strength and that by doing so that strength will be used to their benefit. The thing is, you can’t count on someone who does not feel empathy, thinks of it as a weakness, to be consistent or loyal. A person who thinks doing things for others is a weakness is, by definition, not going to do anything because they think it will benefit you.
I discovered a term in a Psychology Today article on workplace bullying from 2023: Betrayal Trauma Theory. The term was introduced by a scholar named Freyd, founder of the Center for Institutional Courage, and I think it describes something a lot of us are feeling.
Inside betrayal trauma, the initial abuse, such as workplace bullying, is amplified as the organization, which the employee expected to act with integrity and counted on for professional and financial support, pushes her out of the plane without a parachute… In the workplace, a social contract exists, embedded within employees’ expectations… When the system breaks down… a deep sense of betrayal sets in, and the initial harm is magnified, resulting in significant physical, emotional, and professional derailment…
[I]nstitutional betrayal is more likely to occur within organizational structures that resist change and that practice denial, blame, and shame reactions when problems arise. Moreover, organizational cultures that normalize abusive behavior, ignore reports of problems, and retaliate against whistleblowers tend to exhibit high instances of institutional betrayal.
As Musk gleefully brandishes his chainsaw and mocks the pain of those his actions harm, it is normal to feel betrayed.
According to the Center for Institutional Courage’s web page: “Institutional betrayal follows a number of predictable patterns.It’s easy to spot one particular pattern—DARVO (Deny, Attack, & Reverse Victim and Offender)—once you know how it works.”
Those letters that claim the people who were fired from government jobs were fired because they were incompetent are an example of DARVO. You are not the victim of an ideologically based slashing of the social contract, you are the offender for having the temerity to be working for the government in the first place. You are wasteful and fraudulent, and if you’re not, it doesn’t matter because you’re a non-player character.
Bullies are predictable and they are loud. But do not forget that bullying is morally wrong and empathy is morally right.
*I can’t say with any certainty, but my guess is that the priorities were not making it easier for U.S. officials to accept bribery, fast tracking clear cutting in national forests, allowing more raw sewage to be dumped in waterways, higher prescription drug costs, and higher overdraft fees. I could be wrong.
Story and Self 