Bullying, October, And Napoleon Bonaparte: A Month In Recap

If you ever want to really understand how MAGA and other fascist movements work, don’t bother studying Nazis, study school bullies. No… seriously, the tactics are exactly the same. It’s all fear of the “other” that turns to hatred, which causes people to ignore the bully’s abuses; at least initially.

Eventually, the hatred builds to a point where people start asking if there’s a… solution to the problematic “other”, to which the bully is all too happy to reply, “Absolutely! Shunning and, ultimately violence!” The only differences between fascism and bullying end up being international human rights law violations and body count.

To answer the obvious question: no, I’m not being even a little hyperbolic. Bullying is diet fascism. Ignore the results and look at the methods, bullying and fascism use the same moves to reach their goals. On a brighter note, bullies and fascists inevitably share the same fate; people rise up and the bully’s world of short-term gains collapses.

One of the interesting differences between bullies and full-on fascists is that the sundown periods look different, mostly because fascists inevitably have better control of their messaging. You wouldn’t see a successful fascist calling an entire population garbage, have themselves called garbage by the opposition and then wear trash bags and ride around in garbage trucks to cement that word as the defining image of the end of their run. MAGA have been called garbage people and then leaned into it, possibly believing that by leaning in, they look cool; when in reality, MAGA is now inextricably linked to the word garbage.

MAGA, by their own admission, is now only a movement for garbage people.

It should’ve taken a good communications professional about a second to see the problem here. Tony Hinchliffe, the “comic” who called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean” should have been castigated and damage control should have immediately started so as to not lose the Latin-American vote. (Because the last thing the GOP needs right now is to further bleed away voters.) Trump should have set up events in Miami and Texas (and Maybe Puerto Rico) but I guess his campaign figured it was too late and the damage from that gaffe was added to the long list of self-inflicted October surprises that plagued the 2024 GOP presidential campaign.

• Mark Robinson: the transgender porn-loving, porn store-frequenting, “black Nazi”
• The Woodward book accurately paints Trump as a deteriorating wannabe Hitler.
• Multiple 4-star generals who staffed Trump calling him a fascist who’s unfit to serve as president.
• 40 of 42 senior Trump staffers agree with the generals.
• The Joe Rogan interview that further confirmed the assessment of the generals and the staffers.
• The MAGA bund rally in Madison Square Garden indelibly solidified that image and created the garbage scandal.
• Elon Musk and his PAC’s slave-labor canvassing campaign.
• Stacey Williams: yet another victim of Trump’s long history of sexual assault coming forward.
• Rumors of a video where Trump molests a teenager in front her father, a major MAGA donor.
• Ghislane Maxwell finishing her memoir, which might not have hurt the campaign, but the possibility of release undoubtedly put them on edge.
• The Epstein flight logs.
• Rumors of a report about the rally in Butler saying the attempted assassination was staged.

I’m sure there’s more I’m forgetting, but remember, this was just the month of OCTOBER. Even a quarter of this much bad press in a month would sink any normal, sane campaign.

The problem, and why the race is so close boils down to another fact about bullies: bully rhetoric attracts the hateful and uninformed. Bullies present an easy target for the hateful and those not thinking too hard to lay blame on for any bad situation, even situations where there is no bad actually extant. Bullies create a problem and provide an easy target. The only real way out for the target is to point out exactly how vacuous the attempts to blame them are, and in that respect, the Harris/Walz campaign have done the job beautifully.

A thing to remember about a bully’s life cycle: their successes are short-lived and their failures are often self-inflicted. Napoleon Bonaparte once said: “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake”, apparently the Harris/Walz campaign has taken that advice. 

I have been saying for months that the Harris/Walz campaign would have to play error-free ball to win, and they’ve done it. There are few, if any arguments against her that haven’t fallen flat, as evidenced by the MAGA ground game switching to silly arguments about ephemera like Harris’ job at McDonald’s in the 80s. The Harris/Walz campaign also dialed back the rhetoric in October, letting Trump talk.

In this past month, Trump has almost spent more time in the media in costume than out. He’s been a fry-cook and a garbage man and those images have had more staying power than the photo from the assassination attempt in Butler. Far from projecting an image of strength, they’ve made Trump look, frankly fatuous. The video of Trump unable to open the garbage truck door and the image of him leaning out of the passenger side window say less, serious leader and more, bring in the clowns.

And that’s the eventual end of bullies: a descent into mean-spirited clownishness and eventually, total collapse. God willing, that collapse occurs on November 5th, because a bully coming back into power is not something I want to have to explain.