Robert Reich: Trump is a bully, but I'm fighting back

I’m feeling optimistic about Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.

I want to put this extraordinary moment into context.

Like many of you, I’ve worked my heart out during elections. (My first one was in 1968, when I went “clean for Gene” — Eugene McCarthy — shaved off my beard and organized volunteers to go door-to-door for the anti-Vietnam War candidate.) And like many of you, I’ve been heartbroken by some election outcomes.

This one feels different.

Over my lifetime there’s been a shift in power: from small businesses, local and regional banks, labor unions, and political parties to giant corporations, Wall Street, and a handful of obscenely wealthy donors.

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Today, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, and the Democratic Party, have a real chance to take back some of that power on behalf of all of us.

In the 1950s and 1960s, America created the largest middle class the world had ever seen. It gave America enough confidence to pass the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act. It enabled people of color and women to begin to gain ground. And we had a Supreme Court that encouraged this.

Then around 1980, progress stopped. The bullies began taking over.

As a kid, I was always a head shorter than other boys, which meant I was bullied, mocked, threatened, sometimes assaulted.

Over the last four decades, America has allowed fiercer bullying than anything I experienced as a kid. Wealthier Americans have bullied poorer Americans, CEOs have bullied their workers, white people have bullied people of color, men have bullied women, people born in America have bullied new arrivals and undocumented workers.

Sometimes bullying involves physical violence, but more often it entails intimidation, displays of dominance, demands for submission, or arbitrary decisions over the lives of those who have no choice but to accept them.

At some point, those who are bullied fight back.

I remember the day I did, when I had had enough. I was 10 years old. One morning when I was waiting for the school bus, a local bully started shaking me down. He wanted my lunch box and the change in my pocket. He began threatening me physically, as he had done several times before.

I felt power well up inside me. I quietly put down my lunch box and punched the bully in the nose.

It was a mild punch. It merely stunned him. (It stunned me, too. I had never delivered even a mild punch before — nor have I since.) But it demonstrated that I wouldn’t take his bullying any longer. And from that day onward, he left me alone.

Donald Trump is a bully. He has used his wealth to gain power, and used his power to target people of color, harass and abuse women, lie, violate the law, trample on our Constitution, and rage at anyone who calls him on his bullying.

Since Joe Biden passed the torch to Kamala Harris, Trump has been on the defensive. But make no mistake: He became president by exploiting the anger of millions of white working-class Americans who for decades have been economically and culturally bullied by corporate executives, Wall Street, and upper middle-class urban professionals.

The bullied are still there; Trump is still exploiting their anger.

For nearly a decade, Trump has channeled that anger into racism, nativism, and misogyny. He has encouraged his followers to feel powerful by bullying those with even less power: poor Black and Latino people, immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, Muslims, families seeking asylum, undocumented workers, pregnant women who can’t afford to travel to a state where abortions are legal.

This bullying game has been played repeatedly in history by self-described strongmen who pretend to be tribunes of the oppressed by scapegoating the truly powerless, but who are actually fronting for the rich and powerful.

In reality, Trump and his lackeys work for the oligarchs — cutting their taxes, rolling back regulations that protect the public but that cost the oligarchs, and dividing the rest of us into warring factions so we don’t look upward to see where most power and wealth have gone.

The good news is that Americans are catching on.

Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are part of a movement to make America more inclusive, strengthen our democracy, and stop the bullying.

The real fight between now and Election Day is not between Democrats and Republicans, as the two parties came to be known in the decades after World War II.

It is a fight that began to take shape in 1968 when Nixon won the presidency, that became bellicose after 1980 when Ronald Reagan took office, and that came into full view in 2016 when Trump won the electoral vote.

It is between democracy and oligarchy, between self-government and tyranny. It is a fight between the bullies and the bullied.

I have much the same feeling now as I had when I was 10 years old at the bus stop. I believe tens of millions of other Americans are experiencing it, too — including you.

We are feeling the power well up within us. We are quietly putting down our lunch boxes and are about to demonstrate to the bullies — peacefully, through the power of our votes — that we will no longer take their bullying.

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Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/