Trump the bully

Writers have fracked the literary canon in search of a character who best resembles Donald Trump. Is he Richard III? Nah, Richard III was witty and Trump isn’t. Is he Willie Stark, the protagonist from Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men? There’s a passing resemblance, but Willie was a drunk and a life-long pol; Trump’s a teetotaler in office for the first time. Lonesome Rhodes from A Face in the Crowd? The TV demagoguery fits, but Rhodes was never a candidate. Bane from The Dark Knight Rises, whom Trump quoted in his inaugural speech? Or is Trump an amalgam of characters out of Mark Twain?

My explorations of the canon for Trump’s literary antecedent sent me back to one of my favorite writers, novelist Stanley Elkin. Elkin’s short story “A Poetics for Bullies” from the April 1965 issue of Esquire, which also appeared in his Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers collection, anticipated the irritable mental gestures (to pinch a phrase) that define the 45th president of the United States. The story’s protagonist is a high-schooler, perhaps an older middle-schooler, who goes by the name of Push the Bully, who introduces himself in the first paragraph thusly:

I’m Push the bully, and what I hate are new kids and sissies, dumb kids and smart, rich kids, poor kids, kids who wear glasses, talk funny, show off, patrol boys and wise guys and kids who pass pencils and water the plants — and cripples, especially cripples. I love nobody loved.

Push’s reign of terror extends from physical punishment — “Did you ever see a match burn twice?” — to swiping the game ball from other kids to promising 6-year-olds a stick of gum and then abandoning them in an auditorium to endlessly pushing his way to first in line. Push can smell weakness in others, and when he does, he exploits it. When he locates confidence in others, he does his best to undermine it. Even those who are completely normal and unafflicted feel the ridicules of his expert mimicry.

Like Push’s insults, Trump’s insults needn’t be accurate to score.

Push doesn’t beat people up. He uses his head to beat them down with insults and cruelties to cement his place in the pecking order — not unlike Donald Trump. Trump, you’ll recall, spackled the campaign trail with thousands of insults for his opponents, media organizations, newscasters, government officials, reporters, celebrities, entire nations, a department store (Macy’s), NATO, protesters, Super Bowl 50, pollsters, businessmen and more. And that’s just counting his Twitter feed. Trump’s insults, often coarse, are sharpened by hand and are usually tipped by a smear of dung to poison foes. During the campaign he availed himself of the entire insult catalogue — Carly Fiorina’s looks, for example, John Kasich’s dining manners, Jeb Bush’s “energy,” and Rick Perry’s IQ.

Like Push’s insults, Trump’s insults needn’t be accurate to score. His insults exact damage by violating the usual comity that governs civilized life. Like a Hell’s Angel, Trump transgresses for the pure joy of it, and he gets away with it because few possess the will to descend to his level and retaliate. Marco Rubio tried to bully Trump back, calling him a con artist and mocking, we were left to presume, the size of Trump’s wedding vegetables. Trump, unwounded, ate him alive, tweeting, “Lightweight Marco Rubio was working hard last night. The problem is, he is a choker, and once a choker, always a choker! Mr. Meltdown.” Rubio soon regretted the personal slights, but his remorse was more about losing the schoolyard brawl than about the stuff of his digs.

Even in victory, Trump continues the tormenting if not the physical insults. CNN, he tweeted this week, is “FAKE NEWS,” which is more a lie than it is a taunt. Chelsea Manning is an “Ungrateful TRAITOR.” Rep. John Lewis is “All talk, talk, talk — no action or results.”

Like Push, Trump navigates by internal rancor. Unhappy with his own humanity, he craves for what he can’t have, which is our respect. “I wish I were tall, or fat, or thin,” Push says. “I wish I had different eyes, different hands, a mother in the supermarket. I wish I were a man, a small boy, a girl in the choir. I’m a coveter, a Boston Blackie of the heart, casing the world.” Had Push been a real person, Jeff Zucker would have hired him to host The Apprentice instead of Trump.

In his book, Reading Stanley Elkin, Peter J. Bailey writes that Push defines himself “largely in terms of the spontaneous, gratuitous, irrational desires he feels but cannot gratify; he incessantly and obsessively wants to encompass more, have more, be more than his paltry single share of existence allows him to encompass, have, be.” Push, like our new president, attacks the inadequacies of others because he’s super-aware of his own. His hair color and his Dorito skin tone are only the most visible manifestations of his self-loathing.

Not to ruin the story for you (SPOILER ALERT), but a new kid whose voice Push can’t mock, whose charisma he can’t tarnish, whose decency he cannot pollute upends him. The new kid can’t be physically bullied, either, and when Push sucker-punches him, he fights back and extends the hand of friendship to Push after throttling him. “Push is not so much dissatisfied with what he is as angry at all that he isn’t,” Bailey writes.

Barack Obama and Donald Trump smile at the White House | Kevin Dietsch-Pool/Getty Images

Trump didn’t throw a Pushian punch at President Barack Obama when they met in the White House in November. But reviewing the video excerpt from the session, you needn’t have read “A Poetic for Bullies” to sense that Obama’s bearing caused Trump to curb his bile. It’s not that Obama is a Christ-child or that he’s immune to mimicry. But Trump has insulted — bullied — Obama repeatedly over the years, yet the lies and the slights and the scorn have never found purchase with him the way they did the Republican candidates or Hillary Clinton.

I’m no Obama sentimentalist. I never voted for him. I threw bricks at him. I only observe here that Obama’s comportment had a way of neutralizing Trump’s slights while still permitting him to return fire in a buoyant manner. “Now, if somebody can’t handle a Twitter account, they can’t handle the nuclear codes,” Obama said just before the election after it was reported that Republican staffers had removed Trump from his Twitter.

Other means of repelling Trump’s mean girlisms may exist, but I suspect I’m onto something here. If the short story fits, Mr. President, read it.

Jack Shafer is POLITICO‘s senior media writer.