Stand Up To Bullies!

There is a playbook, actually, for dealing with Trump.

Feb 02, 2026

It’s the first thing you learn when you go to some rough-and-tumble new school—if you run into a bully, the trick is to stand up to them. More than the particular situation, what matters is the underlying psychology. The point is that, whatever else seems to be going on, bullies usually prefer to puff up than to follow through, and, once they sniff strength, they’ll tend to move on to someone they can more readily pick on.

After ten years of Trumpism—ten-and-a-half if we date our current era to Trump’s descent down the golden escalator—the great wisdom of our time may simply be to confirm the schoolyard adage.

That’s pretty much exactly how Trump has expressed his own view of himself and his politics. In an interview with Michael D’Antonio in 2014, Trump, speaking of himself as a child, said, “When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same. The temperament is not that different.” And what he’s describing is a childhood of being a holy terror. In reminiscences put together by The Washington Post in 2016, former classmates remember him being part of a group of boys who “pulled girls’ hair, passed notes, and talked out of turn”—with detention itself renamed as “the Donny Trump” or the “DT.” One classmate recalled seeing Trump and his friends jump off their bicycles to beat up another boy. “It’s kind of like a little video snippet that remains in my brain because I think it was so unusual and terrifying at that age,” said the classmate, Steve Nachtigall. “He was a loudmouth bully.”

Trump himself would recall punching his second-grade teacher for not “[knowing] anything about music.” (The teacher, for his part, denied the incident but told his son, “When that kid was ten, even then he was a little shit.”) It was bad enough that, after seventh grade, his father—who described him as “a pretty rough fellow when he was small”—sent him to military school, and, there, some degree of discipline was imposed. “If you stepped out of line, [the teacher] smacked you and smacked you hard,” Trump admiringly reminisced. For Trump, that was the lesson that mattered. “If he sensed strength but you didn’t try to undermine him, he treated you like a man,” he recalled of Theodore Dobias, the former drill sergeant who was a formative influence on him.

Throughout Trump’s pronouncements there is always exactly this sentiment—the image of unstoppable forces that will get their way until they finally run into immovable objects. At a memorable moment in the 2016 presidential debates—when asked to say something nice about Hillary Clinton—he responded, “She’s a fighter. I disagree with much of what she’s fighting for … But she does fight hard and she doesn’t quit and she doesn’t give up. And I consider that to be a very good trait.” And, in laying out a policy for Russia and Ukraine in 2025, Trump described it, again, in schoolyard terms: “The sides are locked in, and they are fighting and sometimes, you have to let them fight.”

It’s not a very complicated worldview, but Trump has been remarkably consistent in it, and only now—really—are some of his political interlocutors catching on. The general reaction to Trump from the moment he secured the nomination in 2016 has been to placate him—so many of the Never Trumpers have ended up in his administration, so many opponents have found themselves kissing the ring. Trump’s return to office in 2025 was accompanied by a wave of obeisance—Columbia University agreeing to pay $200 million to the administration in order to free up frozen grants; leading law firms pledging $1 billion of pro bono legal work for conservative causes; Paramount paying $16 million to settle a lawsuit with a corporate merger pending. But, a year in, we see what happens when people stand up to Trump. Basically, he folds. That’s a real takeaway—and should be the lesson for anyone else who finds themselves in Trump’s sights.

They Keep Lying To Us

Sam Kahn

Jan 25

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The European Union has, in the last decades, not exactly built up a reputation for itself for courage, but, in the face of Trump’s swaggering threats to take Greenland, Europe’s leaders discovered the virtues of having a backbone. At the World Economic Forum in Davos last month, Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever said, “Being a happy vassal is one thing, being a miserable slave is something else. If you back down now, you’re going to lose your dignity, that’s probably the most precious thing you can have in a democracy.” French president Emmanuel Macron said, “Europe has very strong tools now, and we have to use them when we are not respected.”

Crucially, European leaders, in an emergency session, put together a package of counter-tariffs to take effect against American goods. And, even more crucially, Denmark—a nation of six million with active armed forces of about 20,000—seemed to commit itself to an active defense of Greenland, deploying several hundred additional troops, accompanied by forces from additional European nations.

The Europeans seem to have learned the hard way that it is only standing up to Trump that can get him to back down. Earlier approaches—for instance, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte in 2024 appearing to refer to Trump as “daddy”—didn’t quite have the intended effect, with Trump in January ramping up his demands for Greenland as well as threatening tariffs against Europe. As David Brooks put it in an op-ed in early 2025, that conciliation fundamentally misunderstands Trump’s psychology. “Don’t overthink this,” he wrote. “American foreign policy is now oriented to whatever gets Trump’s hormones surging. He has a lifelong thing for manly virility. In the MAGA mind, Vladimir Putin codes as hard; Western Europe codes as soft.” And, to a playground bully, soft means that you are ripe for the extraction of further resources as well as whatever kind of humiliation the bully can think to impose.

By standing tall in Greenland and threatening counter-tariffs—rattling sabers of their own—Europe has changed the bully’s calculation. Trump, in his Davos speech, said of his Greenland aspirations, “I’m not going to use force. I won’t use force.” That really is a remarkable comedown from the rhetoric the White House had very recently been espousing on Greenland.

The maybe-even-more-compelling example of standing up to Trump came from the citizenry of Minneapolis. Operation Metro Surge—the deployment of thousands of ICE and Border Patrol agents in an effort to deport illegal immigrants and curb fraud—was clearly meant to be a kind of shock-and-awe campaign, showing off Trump’s ability to dominate even a blue city and blue state. As he wrote on social media just prior to the ramp-up, “FEAR NOT, GREAT PEOPLE OF MINNESOTA, THE DAY OF RECKONING & RETRIBUTION IS COMING!”

But ICE, in Minneapolis, seemed to run into something very different—a tenacious civic resistance. Minnesotans organized themselves to bring food and supplies to residents who believed themselves to be ICE targets and had gone into hiding; they blew whistles at the approach of ICE vehicles and assiduously documented their activities. Even Trump officials seemed to display a degree of begrudging admiration for the show of force Minneapolis residents had put up. “It’s extremely organized,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in an interview on Fox. “The signs they have are all matching, they’re well-written, and look at what’s happening today. How did these people know how to get gas masks? Would you know how to walk down the street right now and buy a gas mask? Think about that!”

Bondi was depicting the resistors—misled by Minnesota’s Democratic governor and Minneapolis’ Democratic mayor—as being unpatriotic, but there was of course another interpretation. “What [ICE] discovered in the frozen North was something different: a real resistance, broad and organized and overwhelmingly nonviolent, the kind of movement that emerges only under sustained attacks by an oppressive state,” wrote Adam Serwer in The Atlantic. To many of the Minnesotans whom Serwer spoke with, it really was a very simple calculation: Do you stand up or do you back down? And if the antics of Border Patrol senior officer Greg Bovino, and the tactical gear deployed by ICE officers in what should have been routine law enforcement operations, and the tear gas and stun guns used to disperse protestors, were all meant to overawe, it seemed not to impress as much as it might have. One protestor speaking to Serwer claimed that the presence of volunteer observers usually compelled the ICE agents to move on to a new location. “They are huge pussies, I will be honest,” she said.

It is difficult to interpret the administration’s actions last week in any other way than as a change of course in the face of unexpected resistance. The swaggering Bovino was fired from his role as commander-at-large and reassigned to California. Border Czar Tom Homan, taking over in Minneapolis, acknowledged that mistakes had been made. “I’m not here because the federal government has carried out this mission perfectly,” he said on Thursday. And Trump, who has previously called Minnesota Governor Tim Walz “retarded,” had an apparently civil call with him, which seemed to indicate a drawdown in federal tactics.

Serwer, writing in The Atlantic, couldn’t resist a bit of jingoistic language of his own. “Every social theory undergirding Trumpism has been broken on the steel of Minnesotan resolve,” he wrote. That may be pushing things a bit far. Aggressive ICE operations have continued in Minnesota, and Trump’s term as president continues for three more years. But there is a lesson to be learned and it really couldn’t be more simple: Bullies prey on weakness. If anyone stands up to a bully—whether that’s European leaders or the citizenry of Minneapolis—the bully has a tendency to wander off and bother somebody else.

Sam Kahn is associate editor at Persuasion, writes the Substack Castalia, and edits The Republic of Letters.

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