A Bully Without a Bully Pulpit: The Glorious Quiet of Post-Trump Social Media

In order to be truly effective, a bully needs an audience. A bully needs a crowd. A bully needs a gaggle of weak-minded conformists who will gather around him at recess as he terrorizes the class geek to cheer him on and antagonize his victim.

That’s why they’re called schoolyard bullies: they desperately need the attention, support and mindless hoots and hollers of an angry mob.  

For the last four and a half years or so Donald Trump has been our culture’s preeminent bully and the Republican Party has been the gaggle of weak-minded conformists mindlessly cheering on his casual sadism. 

Trump needs an audience. That’s why Trump resumed rallies during the pandemic despite knowing that they would be super-spreader events destined to kill a good number of Trump’s most loyal supporters, people literally willing to die to hear him speak. 

Trump needed the roar of the crowd to tell him that he wasn’t just special, but a veritable God among men, a truth teller and righteous warrior and quite possibly also the only thing standing between our little ones and a Satanic cabal of cannibalistic pedophiles made up of top Democrats and leading Hollywood celebrities. 

The disgraced, twice-impeached ex-president similarly needs the love, attention and validation of Twitter followers in order to feel truly alive. He needs likes and re-tweets and quote tweets and droolingly sycophantic replies assuring him that he’s the greatest president of all time, and that anyone  who doubts that incontrovertible fact is motivated exclusively by jealousy. 

Trump needed the office of the presidency to make him feel like he wasn’t just a powerful man but the most powerful man in the world, with all of the support and importance that entails. 

Trump’s desperate need to be propped up by the love of a huge, massive crowd similarly helps explain his need to constantly mention that he received seventy-five million votes as well as his obsession with the sizes of the crowds at his rallies. 

When Trump brags that he received 75 million votes he’s saying that 75 million people love him unconditionally, that they think he’s special, that they think he should be president for life and that Joe Biden is a corrupt Communist pedophile controlled by China, AOC and George Soros. 

By continually boasting about his seventy-five million votes, Trump is implicitly suggesting that when he says Sleepy Joe is a dumb dumb and a total loser and also probably a bed-wetter there are seventy-five million Republicans cheering, “Hell yeah, DJT! Fuck him up! Make him cry! Make him bleed!”

What we are seeing right now is the poignant powerlessness of a bully without an audience, without a crowd to back him up, without the ugly enthusiasm of the MAGA mob. 

It would be a mistake, of course, to under-estimate Trump and the psychotic devotion of his followers. Trump still maintains an awful lot of power within the Republican party, as evidenced by the price Republicans have had to pay for voting for his impeachment or speaking out against him but without Twitter and the power and ubiquity of the presidency he cuts an unmistakably tragic figure, a half-literate American King Lear hopped up on Caffeine, Adderall and fast food grease. 

Without Twitter, Trump has been reduced to writing statements articulating his hatred for Mitch McConnell and the New York state prosecutor who went all the way up to the Supreme Court in a successful attempt to make Trump’s tax record public. 

The verbiage and attitude are the same as his Twitter rants, a toxic, loathsome combination of unbearable arrogance and petty slights devoid of self-awareness or humility, but the spirit is just not there. 

Without a crowd to cheer him on, or re-tweet his nonsense and insanity, Trump’s insults and boasts ring hollow. They’re nothing but hot air, the narcissistic ramblings of a man who is lost without a crowd.

Now when Trump awkwardly insists that he won the election by a landslide, and everybody knows he won, and he’s the biggest winner ever, and the most special, we can collectively roll our eyes and condescendingly insist, “Sure you did, grandpa. And you also made love to Marilyn Monroe and single-handedly defeated Hitler when you fought in WWII.” 

Trump will find a way to hijack the national discourse, to make it all about himself again. That’s what Trump does. He angrily demands our attention, both positive and negative, and receives it. 

The former host of The Apprentice will join Parler or start his own social network site or news outlet or he will announce his candidacy for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination and start holding big rallies where he can once again receive the sweet, sweet attention and validation he not only craves but needs in order to feel alive. 

The boss baby of the Republican Party will start throwing tantrums loud and obnoxious enough to be heard throughout the internet and the offline world as well pretty soon but right now I am loving the peace and quiet that has come with Trump’s electoral defeat and de-platforming. 

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