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.
by Olivia Nuzzi
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.”
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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.
more:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/09/16/bullying-experts-trump-is-an-eighth-grade-girl.html?via=newsletter&source=DDMorning
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