President Donald Trump is just like a stereotypical high school “mean girl” bully, at least according to a writer who describes having been bullied in high school. The way to stop him, she adds, is to channel what worked in the adolescent social setting.
“I think about this a lot while watching how Donald Trump runs the White House and the world alongside a high school clique of dumb jocks (Pete Hegseth!) and hot cheerleaders (Natalie Harp!) and nerdy suck-ups (Mike Johnson!),” wrote The New York Times’ contributing writer Molly Jong-Fast on Sunday. She provided details about the Trump White House that illustrate this point.
“Mr. Trump’s cabinet of curiosities wears matching $145 Florsheim Oxfords, gifted by the president himself,” Jong-Fast reported. “They’re reportedly eating the same ‘living diet,’ which consists almost entirely of hunks of meat and globs of sauerkraut. (Adherents are said to include: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, Vice President JD Vance, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. himself). Mr. Trump’s favorite aide, Ms. Harp, passes the president positive news coverage and good polls like she’s the ‘Mean Girls’ gossip Gretchen Wieners. Other White House staffers and cabinet members have begun to emulate the president’s leggy blond echo chamber cultivator, so much so that the White House has been overtaken by a kind of sycophancy Olympics; members of Trump’s inner circle never miss the chance to praise him in televised cabinet meetings.”
Trump’s handling of Washington like a popularity contest is not limited to the lifestyles he forces on his White House officials. It also extends to how he hired them in the first place.
“The president reportedly considered sizzle reels of candidates’ cable news hits; the focus was not on who was most qualified to do the job, but who managed to best dazzle dear leader,” Jong-Fast explained. “Once a cabinet member was installed in office, it seemed like the only thing that mattered was continuing to tell the president what he wanted to hear — or saying the right thing on TV — as opposed to giving sound advice in service of the nation.”
Jong-Fast concluded, “Eventually I learned to stand up to my bully. If the midterms go their way, the Democrats will, I hope, have the means to be able to as well. As he becomes even more self-destructive, the Republicans could — in a late-breaking fit of attempted self-preservation — do so too. Teenage girls can’t invoke the 25th Amendment on their bullies, but this cabinet theoretically could.”
Speaking with AlterNet in August, University of Bristol cognitive scientist Dr. Stephan Lewandowsky explained how Trump and his supporters display “mean” traits in large part because of the political brand Trump has cultivated. Through his political style, Trump feeds into what is known as the dark triad of personality: psychopathy, Machiavellianism and narcissism
“We know that trolls take pleasure in trolling, which means getting other people upset,” Lewandowsky told AlterNet. “And I think that’s what we’re observing here — this is basically trolling behavior. So would these people score high on the dark triad? I would think yes, but I don’t know of any data that’s done a personality profile specifically of MAGA voters. We do have it for trolls, though — I have data on that. People have published research on it, and the similarities are just overwhelming. So I’d be very surprised if these were well-adjusted, nice people.”