American Politics: The Dilution of the Left and Psychosis of the Right

THE PROGRESSIVE CYNIC

MODERN AMERICAN POLITICS IS FILLED WITH PARTISANSHIP, LEGALIZED CORRUPTION AND EXTREMISM. ON THIS SITE YOU WILL FIND ARTICLES ON A VARIETY OF SUBJECTS AND POINTS OF VIEW THAT ARE NOT NORMALLY PORTRAYED IN THE CORPORATE MEDIA–DON’T EXPECT ANY SUGAR-COATING, PANDERING OR INTEREST MONEY PROPAGANDA HERE.

MENU

SKIP TO CONTENT

• HOME  DEBUNKING RIGHT WING TALKING POINTMEET THE PROGRESSIVE CYNIC

American Politics: The Dilution of the Left and Psychosis of the Right

BY JSAGER99 FEBRUARY 24,  2014

DEMOCRATS INSANE REPUBLICANS MEDIA PARTISAN FIGHTING REPUBLICANSSOCIAL CONSERVATIVE

© Josh Sager – February 2014

 

In recent years, the American political landscape has become paralyzed by a toxic combination of partisan extremism, legalized corruption by moneyed interests, and an obstinately “neutral” media that calls every argument even. Unfortunately, this political climate has bred a situation where one political party has become diluted in its policy preferences while the other is growing increasingly irrational and unstable.

The national Republican Party has attempted to purify itself of almost every representative who does not share in an extreme right wing ideology—even longstanding conservatives like Mitch McConnell are facing ouster from even more extreme right wing candidates. Outside money from partisan interests (ex. the Koch brothers and Walton family) has driven this process, and now these highly extreme politicians have gained enough power to manipulate the GOP in its entirety.

Today, the party line of the GOP is so extreme that it rejects reality and prefers to live in an alternate universe—in this world, climate change isn’t a problem, all regulation is communism, taxes are always too high, the market will work best for all Americans if it is left to its own devices.

The GOP’s partisan purification displaces moderates from the party and forces some to find refuge with the Democrats. While this distillation party shrinks its ranks in the electorate, partisan gerrymandering and the high levels of motivation among their extreme constituents have allowed the GOP to retain enough representation to obstruct the legislative process.

At the same time that the Republicans are fighting their internal partisan war of purification, the Democrats—who are theoretically our country’s left wing party—have become diluted to the point where their policy proposals are center-right. Here are a few examples of this shift:

• The Democrats support cap and trade, which is the center-right, market-based proposal that the GOP once supported.
• The Democrats passed ObamaCare, which is the center-right health insurance solution thatthe GOP championed as the alternative to single-payer or nationalized healthcare.

Beginning with pro-corporate Democrats like Bill Clinton and the blue dogs making common ground with the right wing, the Democrats have steadily moved to the right. What was once the Republican position is now the Democratic Party platform and what was once the Democratic Party platform is considered extreme-left (or socialist by the GOP). When combined with the need to compromise with the extreme-right GOP, this rightward shift for the Democratic position has resulted in the implementation of solidly right wing policies.

The dilution of the Democratic Party ideology with centrists and GOP refugees has eliminated the power of the left within the party. Currently, the American left is largely adrift and without substantive representation in office—it is certainly true that members of the House Progressive caucus and senators like Elizabeth Warren are representing a truly-leftist agenda, but they are hardly in control of their party.

In effect, the entire political spectrum has been shifted to the right and the American people have been left in the dust. Just because the acceptable views of Washington partisans changes, it doesn’t mean that the opinions of those who they theoretically represent do. Large portions of the American population are now being forced to choose between voting for a Democratic Party which doesn’t support their ideals and a Republican Party which has suffered a collective psychotic break.

Unfortunately, the media has largely ignored its duty to report the facts objectively and has neglected to point out these shifts in the partisan landscape. The media portrays the Democrats as representing the left and the Republicans as representing the right, while, in reality, the actual policy consequences of negotiations between the parties shifts underneath the surface.

For The Record, Yes, George W. Bush Did Help Create ISIS

"ISIS didn't exist when my brother was president. Al-Qaida in Iraq was wiped out when my brother was president."

— Jeb Bush on Wednesday, May 20th, 2015 in a roundtable in New Hampshire

Jeb Bush: 'ISIS didn't exist when my brother was president' and al-Qaida was 'wiped out'

By Amy Sherman on Thursday, May 28th, 2015 at 3:39 p.m.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush speaks at a roundtable in New Hampshire May 20, 2015.

After former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush faced a tough couple of weeks related to his comments about whether he would have invaded Iraq even if he had known about faulty intelligence, he used a new tactic in New Hampshire: Blame President Barack Obama.

"The world is radically different, and so the focus ought to be on ‘knowing what you know now, Mr. President, would you, should you have kept 10,000 troops in Iraq?’ " Bush said at a roundtable event in Portsmouth May 20.

Bush noted that the Iraqi city of Ramadi had been taken over by ISIS the day before his roundtable. He then continued:

"ISIS didn’t exist when my brother was president. Al-Qaida in Iraq was wiped out when my brother was president. There were mistakes made in Iraq for sure, but the surge created a fragile but stable Iraq that the president could have built on....." He then criticized how Obama has handled Iraq.

We decided to fact-check Bush’s claims that ISIS did not exist under President George W. Bush and that al-Qaida was wiped out in Iraq. (The Washington Post’s The Fact-Checker examined this issue as well.)

‘ISIS didn't exist when my brother was president’

A spokesman for Bush’s political action committee pointed to a 2014 op-ed by Ali Khedery, who served as senior adviser to three heads of US Central Command from 2003-10.

It starts by saying, "Three years ago, the Islamic State (ISIS) did not exist; now it controls vast swaths of Syria and Iraq."

Technically, yes, a group with the name "ISIS" did not exist under President Bush.

The group’s roots, however, trace back to 2004.

"There were evolutions that took place with some of the name changes," said Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

In 2004, long-time Sunni extremist Abu Mus‘ab al-Zarqawi established Al-Qa‘ida in Iraq (AQI), also known as the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) and more recently the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), according to the National Counterterrorism Center.

After he was killed in a U.S. airstrike in 2006, the group was renamed the Islamic State of Iraq.

In 2013, the group was referred to as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham and then just the Islamic State in 2014, Brian Fishman, a counterterrorism expert at the New America Foundation, told PolitiFact Florida.

"Al-Sham just refers to the Levant and reflects the group's increased focus on Syria," he said. "It reflects a geographic shift rather than change in political focus. It's the same group throughout."

‘Al-Qaida in Iraq was wiped out when my brother was president’

Al-Qaida’s power waxed and waned over the years, but was it "wiped out," as Jeb Bush said?

The group’s targeting of Sunni civilians, which led to a backlash, combined with operations by Coalition forces and the Iraqi government, weakened the group in 2007.

The Congressional Research Service wrote in August 2008 that U.S. officials concluded that al-Qaida in Iraq was "weakened almost to the point of outright defeat  in Iraq, although they say it remains lethal and has the potential to revive in Iraq."

The surge under Bush was successful -- the attacks al-Qaida was carrying out had significantly declined by January 2009 when Bush left office.

"Literally everybody viewed this as a defeat for ISIS," Gartenstein-Ross said. "When I say everybody I mean al-Qaida included. They viewed this as a major defeat to its brand."

A spokesman for Jeb Bush pointed to several articles that noted how the group was weakened, including a Washington Post article that stated that in 2009 "the power of the Islamist militancy in Iraq was at its lowest ebb, and the number of killings had plunged."

In 2010, Vice President Joe Biden declared success in Iraq. When the combat mission ends, he said the administration "will be able to point to it and say, ‘We told you what we’re going to do, and we did it.’"

But three factors led the group to a comeback: the Syrian war, the Iraqi government ruled in a sectarian way that alienated Sunnis, and the U.S. withdrew troops.

Two experts we interviewed disagreed with each other on the extent that al-Qaida was "wiped out" under Bush.

"There is no doubt that the surge hurt AQI/ISI deeply," Fishman told PolitiFact Florida. "The group was much weaker as a result. But it remained vibrant by the standards of any other AQ-linked jihadi group in the world."

Derek Harvey, a retired U.S. Army colonel who provided counsel to the U.S. on Iraq during Bush’s presidency and is now a professor at the University of South Florida, told PolitiFact that he disagreed with Fishman’s statement about the strength of ISI.

"The fact is that the few remnants of the organization found refuge in Syria, and it was there that they found the space and time to rebuild in 2009-11, and by summer 2012 they were strong enough to reemerge in Sunni Arab provinces in Iraq," he said. "Although there will always be remnants of terror groups, I say that Jeb Bush is accurate that AQI was wiped out."

But al-Qaida did have a rebirth, Harvey said. 

"Both al-Qaida as a larger organization, and the Islamic State are far more powerful, diffused into more lands and among more distant peoples than at any time during the Bush years," Harvey said.

In 2014, Obama was criticized for underestimating the Islamic State when he referred to it as a "JV" team in a January article in the New Yorker.

In February 2014, the leadership of al-Qaida disowned the Islamic State of Iraq stating online that its former affiliate "is not a branch of the al-Qaida group (and al-Qaida) does not have an organizational relationship with it and is not the group responsible for their actions,"Time wrote.

We will turn to Michael O’Hanlon, an expert on defense policy at the Brookings Institute, to summarize a critique of both of Bush’s claims:

"ISIL is a relatively new creation, but its roots are in al-Qaida in Iraq. Al-Qaida was significantly weakened by President Bush and company, but it was not wiped out. Moreover, the dynamics that the Iraq war set in motion contributed to the rise of ISIL, because Syria facilitated movement of many foreign fighters in and out of Iraq, and some of them resettled in Syria after the Iraq surge.

"Also, al-Qaida in Iraq didn’t really exist before the 2003 invasion," O’Hanlon said. "So it’s too clean and neat for Gov. Bush to make the statement he did; there are kernels of truth in his claim but it misses a broader reality."

Our ruling

Bush said, "ISIS didn't exist when my brother was President. Al-Qaida in Iraq was wiped out when my brother was president."

There are problems with both pieces of Bush’s claim. Yes, a group called ISIS didn’t exist while Bush was president, but the roots of the organization were indeed present and operating under a different banner.

As far as claiming al-Qaida was "wiped out," most experts consider that a stretch. The group’s power certainly diminished under Bush but it wasn’t wiped out.

Bush’s statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. We rate this claim Mostly False.

HUFF POST

For The Record, Yes, George W. Bush Did Help Create ISIS

Akbar Shahid Ahmed Become a fanakbar.ahmed@huffingtonpost.com

Ryan Grim Become a fanryan@huffingtonpost.com

WASHINGTON -- Jeb Bush isn't even an official presidential candidate yet, but he's already facing a serious challenge to his candidacy -- and it just got worse because of a 19-year-old.

"Your brother created ISIS," college student Ivy Ziedrich told Bush during a town-hall-style meeting in Reno, Nevada, on Wednesday. "ISIS" is a common name for the militant group that calls itself the Islamic State, and the "brother" in question, of course, is former President George W. Bush.

Moments earlier, the former Florida governor had been telling the audience that President Barack Obama was responsible for the rise of the militant group. But Ziedrich, a student at the University of Nevada, Reno, replied that Bush's version of history glossed over a few key events.

"You stated that ISIS was created because we don't have enough presence and we've been pulling out of the Middle East," she said. "However, the threat of ISIS was created by the Iraqi coalition authority, which ousted the entire government of Iraq. It was when 30,000 individuals who are part of the Iraqi military were forced out. They had no employment, they had no income, yet they were left with access to all the same arms and weapons."

Ziedrich's rebuttal to Bush came at a moment when the likely candidate was already facing questions over an earlier statement that appeared to suggest he supported the invasion of Iraq. (Bush walked back those comments Thursday, saying that "knowing what we know now," he would not have invaded the country.) And while Bush might not like to admit it, the truth is that Ziedrich's comments capture a point that has long been emphasized by Middle East watchers -- namely, that the Bush administration's mismanagement of Iraq encouraged thousands of skilled Iraqis to take their expertise to the anti-American insurgency that eventually became the Islamic State.

Jeb Bush and other Republicans have accused Obama of enabling the insurgency by withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq at the end of 2011. The administration says it could not have maintained the troops there without an agreement to protect them that Baghdad was not at the time willing to sign.

But Bush's preferred reading of history overlooks the fact that the risk of an Islamic State-level militant expansion was clear back in 2003, after George W. Bush had ordered a U.S. invasion of Iraq on the basis of sketchy evidence. Saddam Hussein had at that point effectively controlled Iraq for more than 30 years. First tasting great power as the country's intelligence and internal security chief, Hussein invested heavily in making Iraq a police state, with loyal, well-trained agents of his Baath Party government as numerous in the country as conspiracy theories about their activities. He also focused on making his army a formidable force, appointing Sunni Arabs -- members of his own sect of Islam and a minority in Iraq -- to leadership positions. Hussein's rule forced those soldiers and officials to become even closer to the despot, because they, like many other people in the centralized quasi-socialist state that was Iraq, were reliant on government salaries, subsidies and favor.

Then an American came to Baghdad and told all those well-trained, well-armed men that their services would no longer be required. Or allowed.

Just over 12 years ago, George W. Bush appointed L. Paul Bremer to run Iraq. Bremer was given massive powers and a mandate to turn Iraq into a GOP dream: a free-market-loving, America-backing Muslim state that would stand as a shining beacon in the Middle East.

Bremer quietly left the country 14 months later, handing over power to an interim government in which 85 percent of Iraqis, at the time, said they lacked confidence. Much of their discontent had to do with Iraq's security problems, which U.S. officials told The Washington Post were exacerbated by Bremer's decision to disband the Iraqi army.

One of the men who lost his job was, according to a major recent report by the German magazine Der Spiegel, a key architect of the Islamic State.

Der Spiegel last month published a story based on captured documents that appear to belong to the Islamic State. Those documents discuss a man known to the militants as Haji Bakr. His real name -- the name by which he was known when he served in Saddam Hussein's air force intelligence services -- was Samir Abd Muhammad al-Khlifawi.

Der Spiegel spoke about Bakr with Iraqi researcher Hisham al-Hashimi, who has advised the Iraqi government. Hashimi said that Bremer's move left the onetime Hussein loyalist "bitter and unemployed."

The report continues:

Thousands of well-trained Sunni officers were robbed of their livelihood with the stroke of a pen. In doing so, America created its most bitter and intelligent enemies. Bakr went underground and met Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Anbar Province in western Iraq. Zarqawi, a Jordanian by birth, had previously run a training camp for international terrorist pilgrims in Afghanistan. Starting in 2003, he gained global notoriety as the mastermind of attacks against the United Nations, US troops and Shiite Muslims. He was even too radical for former Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden. Zarqawi died in a US air strike in 2006.

Although Iraq's dominant Baath Party was secular, the two systems ultimately shared a conviction that control over the masses should lie in the hands of a small elite that should not be answerable to anyone -- because it ruled in the name of a grand plan, legitimized by either God or the glory of Arab history. The secret of IS' success lies in the combination of opposites, the fanatical beliefs of one group and the strategic calculations of the other.

Bakr, a top adviser to Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, died in 2014. By that point, according to Der Spiegel's story and an analysis of Islamic State comments by The Long War Journal, Bakr had firmly established Baghdadi's pre-eminence within the group, helped the militants take over key towns in Syria and played a major role in the group's split from the central al Qaeda leadership in Pakistan and the al Qaeda affiliate in Syria. That last move was central to the Islamic State's claim to statehood and global leadership over Muslims. It is also thought to have enhanced the group's prestige among radicalized youth from around the world, thus making it more attractive to potential recruits.

A Washington Post report from last month confirmed the importance of former Hussein figures like Bakr in the overall Islamic State structure.

"Even with the influx of thousands of foreign fighters, almost all of the leaders of the Islamic State are former Iraqi officers, including the members of its shadowy military and security committees, and the majority of its emirs and princes, according to Iraqis, Syrians and analysts who study the group," the Post reported.

Much as Jeb Bush might dislike the legacy of his brother's policies in Iraq, it will be difficult for him to pretend it doesn't exist. It's one thing to say that he would not repeat the invasion, and another to acknowledge that the decisions made after the invasion have at least as much to do with the rise of the Islamic State as anything Obama later did. The question for Bush now will be how to account for that legacy, because it seems unlikely that Ziedrich will be the last person to bring it up.

Help back Huffington Post journalism by signing up to get an email when Ryan Grim publishes a new story.

Trump and Political Celebrity

by James Hoover / September 16th, 2015

It was the ideal audience for Donald Trump. American Airlines center was packed with 20,000 enthralled Texans who seemed to hang on every word of boast, harangue, and self-aggrandizement that passed through Trump’s lips. They whooped and hollered through 90 minutes of Trump speech-making. In scattered and rather loose references to issues, Trump skillfully intermixed attributes of puerile boasting about his skills, mocking his opponents and their cluelessness, and lionizing his “oft-demonstrated” business skills.

The biggest winner was his condemnation of American immigration policy while characterizing all “illegals” as leaving a large swatch of murder, rape, and pillage in their wake. “I just never thought I’d see the day when someone in politics would say the things he’s saying,” Katherine Trevino said afterwards, who had wept for joy while Trump spoke.

The Trump phenomenon is the natural outgrowth of mixing celebrity and media hype in a political campaign before anger-wrought and hate-mongered voters. Ronald Reagan was perhaps one of the first actors successfully going politician, who bordered on celebrity when media wasn’t all-pervading and powerful.  Arnold Schwarzeneggeremerged later in California when the celebrity culture was more ubiquitous, but Arnold did not have an innate intelligence that matched his celebrity gift of self-marketing.

Trump is another matter. He baked his celebrity into our media ovens over decades, showing his power and control with “you’re fired,” branding his braggadocio for jingoistic audiences, testing political mainstream four years ago with a Birthermessage that even today resonates with 44% of Republicans. Now he emerges into the 2016 maelstrom of GOP candidates, all sporting claptrap messages with no substance and negative thrust.

In 2015, the stage is set. Conservatives have stirred up about eight years of pent-up anger and daily frenzy, mixed with the contemporary fear of eroding white power, two terms of an illegitimate black president, the funding free-for-all brought by conservative judges who inhaled the fumes of a laissez-faire doctrine, all back-dropped with daily doses of imagined Obama administration tyranny and corruption on right-wing media shows. Constant screaming outrage has nearly exhausted angst and anger-ridden Fox and right-wing radio audiences, that is, until the grand entrance of Donald Trump.

Manufactured outrage coupled with the economic tailspin orchestrated by Wall Street moguls — all this frustration, anger, hate, fear, and division absorbed in the bone marrow of beleaguered Americans – left and right – just might be the right climate for a superficial, boastful, bullying, but bright billionaire to actually get the GOP nomination, and if the stars are aligned right, win the big prize.

Historians always try to explain the inexplicable – for example, the rise of Nazi Germany. The victors in World War I helped to create the right conditions by imposing harsh reparations on Germany as punishment for the war with unconditional surrender. Inflation, unemployment, rationing, and depression helped bring festering conditions to Germany that made the emergence of a tyrant possible.

America’s situation is, of course, different but when there is a struggle for power, division and polarization are always useful and ready tools for achieving your goals. Add to that an effective redistribution of wealth and income from the middle class and the poor to the rich, aided by a purchased government, and you have pre-conditions for drastic change. Then add the right – or wrong – leader.

In the annals of history, the famous were recorded for the ages in architecture, stone, and memorials.  Now celebrities rise on marketed images, are elevated and sold and then cast aside. Celebrity is carried with information hurled at us through ubiquitous sources of media. We can transform our mundane lives through the personalized electronic image of the celebrity.

Ideas, issues and abstractions are foreign to a media constantly stripped of such things for entertainment value. Thus Trump, a creature of celebrity, who has always lived for the now, for the attention it garners, has learned to strip reality from his image, replacing it with a carefully structured sur-reality that celebrity demands.

Progressives charge him with sophomoric banter drained of substance and mental challenge, but that is the appeal of celebrity. Celebrity is managed so that it’s not dispersed by demonstrated ignorance, not weakened with questions of challenge, or dissipated with points of debate. Interviewers know that they shouldn’t push for answers if stonewalled with non-answers, Trump seeming to disdain any critical thought.

The corporate media culture, including magazines, TV, newspapers, film production companies are owned by fewer than 20 major corporations.  Therefore, the news products of the media are one perspective, whatever their source. The collage of images, words, and sounds are rather interdependent, more and more shorn of real investigative reporting, and thus facile products of a formulaic event rendering, colored by prescriptions of entertainment and production. Agendas and talking points often come first and the news event follows.

For example, few journalists have acknowledged the presence of white militia and white supremacist groups at Trump rallies or the chanting of “white power” at some political gatherings. I would suspect that Trump doesn’t invite such gatherings but certainly his message does.

Perhaps the biggest threat that a Donald Trump poses is what his rise exemplifies. His manner, his approach, his message lack a serious thoughtfulness that he forfeits in a willful ignorance and an infantile attack of enemies.

His policies are sophomoric and emotional, perhaps more tirade: reckless spending for the military, kick ass for enemies, everybody loves me, and a mocking of environmental protection. We saw the beginning of this attitude in the George W. Bush administration when the president mocked intellectual achievement, lauded mediocrity, harangued curiosity and play-acted foreign policy with a Texas swagger.

Donald Trump seems to be in a Bush replay mode but his intellectual tools are more impressive. Perhaps he wouldn’t even need a dark force like Dick Cheney to orchestrate policy as Bush did in his first term.

James Hoover is a recently retired systems engineer. He has advanced degrees in Economics and English. Prior to his aerospace career, he taught high school, and he has also taught college courses. He recently published a science fiction novel called Extraordinary Visitors and writes political columns on several websites. Read other articles by James.

This article was posted on Wednesday, September 16th, 2015 at 9:57pm and is filed under Culture, Elections, Immigration, Media, Obama, Right Wing Jerks.

• THE DAILY BEAST

Photo Illustration by Dair Massey/The Daily Beast

SO FETCH

09.16.151:05 AM ET

Bullying Experts: Trump Is an Eighth-Grade Girl

Don’t let the comb-over fool you. Donald Trump’s rhetorical style is straight out of middle school.

“He’s like an eighth-grade girl,” Rosalind Wiseman told me. “As an educator who works with children, it’s an amazing thing to watch,” she said, “because you really wish the adults would be the adults and be able to check the person who’s abusing power and being so callous to other people.”

Wiseman knows a child bully when she sees one, having written a series of books on the topic, most famously Queen Bees and Wannabes, about middle-school girls’ viciousness and upon which the movie Mean Girls is based.

But Wiseman wasn’t talking to me about some unruly kid who threw rocks at a mathlete or called his frenemy names in a Burn Book. She was talking about a 69-year-old man from Queens who is seeking the Republican nomination for president of the United States.

She was talking, of course, about Donald Trump.

“He’s absolutely operating as an intelligent, manipulative bully who truly does not care about the consequences of his actions,” Wiseman said. “He delights in his own ability to manipulate and to show that nobody can stop him.”

From the moment Trump announced his candidacy, on June 16, no one has been safe from his wrath. His announcement speech itself felt like a roast of everyone in the world not named Donald Trump. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he said. “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems to us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

Since then, Trump has pilloried, in no particular order, John McCain (“not a war hero”), Jeb Bush (“low energy”), Lindsey Graham (“a beggar”), Anderson Cooper (“waste of time”), Megyn Kelly (“blood coming out of her wherever”), Juan Williams (“like a child”), Forbes magazine (“failed magazine”), The Des Moines Register (“very dishonest”), Arianna Huffington (“liberal clown”), The Weekly Standard (“small and slightly failing magazine”), Rick Perry (“should be forced to take an IQ test”), the Republican National Committee (“very foolish”), Heidi Klum (“no longer a 10”), Univision (“they are doing really badly”), The Wall Street Journal (“ever dwindling”), Carly Fiorina (“Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that?”), Bobby Jindal (“I only respond to people that register more than 1 percent in the polls”), Rand Paul (“didn’t get the right gene”). I could go on.

Trump has ridiculed so many people and places and things that enterprising content creators have made Trump insult generators in his honor. Regular English words are for the time being inextricably linked to Trump because he deploys them so frequently from his insult arsenal: loser, in particular, but also lightweight, stupid, weak, and clown.

But it’s not just that Trump is a prolific and vitriolic critic—it’s that the way Trump tends to make his disapproval known comically calls to mind the schoolyard bully.

Bullying, according to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, “involves repeated exposure of one person to physical and/or relational aggression where the victim is hurt with teasing, name calling, mockery, threats, harassment, taunting, social exclusion or rumors”—or, to put it more concisely, the entire Trump doctrine.

His behavior can be intimidating. Like when, in July, he stood at the lectern at a South Carolina rally and read aloud to the world Lindsey Graham’s personal cellphone number. It was difficult not to wonder, as Trump gleefully encouraged his audience to “give it a shot” and call Graham, whom he might doxx next.

He is relentless. Jeb Bush, the establishment favorite for the nomination, is known for being wonky and serious, and has had some difficulty exciting both the public and the press since launching his campaign. He is, you could say, the anti-Trump. And so, in true Trump fashion, Trump began a campaign to brand Bush as “low energy.” During an interview on Morning Joe recently, Trump said, “He’s a nice person. He is a low energyperson, there’s no question about it. And, you know, I think we need much more than alow energy person right now to put this country back in shape.”

“Usually people mature. They see what they’re doing, they see their part in it–but he’s like an eighth-grade girl that never sees his part in it. Never, ever sees it.”

Perhaps sensing that he was getting under Bush’s skin, Trump made sure to call Bush “low energy” everywhere he went. He even went as far as to release a video based on this insult. “Having trouble sleeping at night? Need some energy? Need some low energy?” the narrator says before introducing footage of Bush speaking.  

Taking cues from the boss, the behavior of Trump’s campaign operatives, too, can be bullying. When, also in July, The Daily Beast reported that during Trump’s divorce from his first wife, Ivana, she accused him of sexual assault (though she later recanted), Michael Cohen, Trump’s lawyer, threatened reporter Tim Mak on the record: “I’m warning you, tread very fucking lightly,” he said, “because what I’m going to do to you is going to be fucking disgusting. You understand me?”

Naomi Drew, a conflict resolution specialist and the author of No Kidding About Bullying, told me she sees in Trump, as Wiseman does, signs of a classic bully.

“People bully to gain power over others, and Trump’s behavior is the epitome of this,” she said. By insulting Fiorina’s appearance, Drew said, Trump was “behaving like the high school bully who’s threatened by a girl who’s smarter than he is,” and by mocking candidates for not polling as well as he is, Trump is “acting like [a] high school football player swaggering into the cafeteria and overturning the lunch tray of a weaker kid.”

Bullies, like most people running for political office, have an unhealthy need for power. That need can be caused, according to Drew, by a number of things: revenge after being bullied themselves, general self-esteem and insecurity issues, or just a total lack of human compassion.

“They see people who are different from them as ‘less than’ and may dehumanize them in the process, which is what Trump does when it comes to illegal immigrants,” Drew said. “He’s positioning immigrants as ‘the other’ and feeding into the hatred and narrowness that seem to be growing. People who bully see their victims as ‘the other,’ as less than human. This allows them to justify cruel behavior. This is what happened in Nazi Germany, with the lynching of blacks, with the marginalization of minorities, gays, and women. Bullying results when this dynamic is present.”

Wiseman told me that usually, with the eighth-grade girls, there is a moment of reckoning that gets them to reform their behavior. But Trump, due to his wealth (“very rich,” he says) and privilege, has never had such a moment, because there have rarely been consequences for the things he says and does.

“For Trump, all of this is working too well,” Wiseman said. “He’s being rewarded in exactly the way he wants to be… Usually people mature. They see what they’re doing, they see their part in it—but he’s like an eighth-grade girl that never sees his part in it. Never, ever sees it.”

Trump is, as Wiseman puts it, “like the kid where no teachers are gonna stop him and no principal is gonna stop him. It’s the kid who knows, who’s figured out, that no one is going to stop him and no one knows how to stop him.”

So the question now, for the rest of the Republican primary field and in a larger sense for the country as a whole, is how do you put the brakes on that kid? How do you stand up to the bully? How do you stand up to the bully on Wednesday night, when he will again take center stage at a debate that seems divinely designed to showcase his mean girl act?

Drew has some advice for the candidates, at least. “Reacting to the bully only increases his power,” she told me. So that means Bush, Fiorina, Jindal, and Graham did themselves a disservice in the long run, even if their tussles with the tinsel-haired tycoon brought them some much-needed publicity in the moment. The way to beat him for good, Drew said, is to counter Trump’s insults “with substantive talk over trash talk.”

So maybe in another democracy.