2024:Year of the Bully

Bibi, Trump, Putin at al.

With apologies to dogs, anything to avoid Trump.

Somewhere along a linguistic timeline, bullying moved from the schoolyard to a much broader swath of behavior. It can even be a positive, as in “Bully for you that you stood up to that bully!”

For the purpose of this consideration, let’s use bully and bullying in the political sense.

The year 2024 is going to be an eventful one for Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Benjamin Netanyahu. The U.S. presidential and congressional elections next November are already being forecast with trepidation. In Russia, Putin’s electorate will anoint him for another dictatorial term. No suspense there. And regardless of whether the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza is resolved, Netanyahu will be contending with the results, either driven from power or maneuvering to get it back.

Netanyahu’s belligerence in challenging democratic principles, along with his wartime policies, have made Israel so divisive an issue in the United States that it adds yet another obstacle to President Joe Biden’s reelection prospects, which prognosticators insist are dire.

At this point, America is guaranteed to face an historical reckoning on how Donald Trump – with ninety-one felony counts and two civil judgments against him, and an overtly fascist litany of second-term pledges – can be said by serious-minded pundits to be the virtually unassailable Republican choice for a second term.

As for Putin, whose self-portrait in the 2001 book First Person touts his family attachments and his nickname “Vovka,” he has evolved so far into tyrannical rule that he can blast one blustering opponent out of the sky – Yevgeny Prigozhin – and imprison a genuine political alternative – Alexei Navalny – essentially forever and have literally no discernible reason for bringing the Ukraine invasion to a close.

Bibi, Trump, and Putin are the triumvirate that have made the world such a mess of violence and fearfulness as 2023 comes to a close. ( Other autocracrats --Xi, Kim, Erdogan, Orban — also strut their stuff. )

And then there is Joe Biden. You may have read that he is old, and even admirers of his efforts as president think he would do best to settle for one term. But the more snark I read about Biden, the more it strikes me that he cannot be bullied out of the presidential contest until he chooses to get out himself.

If you have been in politics for fifty years, became president after running fifth in the Iowa caucuses in 2020, and navigated crises with maximum possible determination, pride abounds before a fall demanded by others.

Until the matter of Trump is resolved – and as the person who beat Trump before – would Biden want to back down and leave Democrats to scramble to replace him? Who exactly is the party ready to rally behind?

Today’s Congress, especially the House of Representatives, is replete with bullying. This is by no means unprecedented. In the 1990s there was Newt Gingrich and his henchmen Dick Armey and Tom DeLay as paragons of politically motivated abuse of others. Now we have Matt Gaetz, who avoided criminal charges that a purported sidekick pleaded guilty to; Marjorie Taylor Greene, stripped of committee appointments and restored with extra power; and Lauren Boebert, who denied engaging in groping when the camera showed that she had. The record of their collective stance deserves the bullying epithets.

Dennis Hastert went to jail as a sex offender after serving as speaker of the House, but his humiliation was self-inflicted – in contrast to Kevin McCarthy, who was beaten by a minority cabal within his own party who pounded him mercilessly before rendering him political roadkill.

So how can all this bullying be resolved? If at the end of 2024 the bullies are still in stride, the consequences will be dreadful. The overuse of apocalyptic predictions has tended to make them less effective. Still, this situation deserves to be called horrific.

Call me a cockeyed optimist, but I believe that Trump v. Biden will not happen. Events, to be determined, will upend current expectations . History is often made by the unexpected and unimaginable. Take the spring of 1968, President Lyndon Johnson, dropped out of the race on March 31 at the close of a speech, Upstart Gene McCarthy’s glow dimmed, Bobby Kennedy, a man whose character now shone, was murdered in June, and Hubert Humphrey was nominated in August.

If the system so badly needs to rally with speed, you have to believe it will.

Bibi’s future is not bright. In 1973, Prime Minister Golda Meir never recovered from the failures of her government early in the Yom Kippur war; the disaster of this current conflict is far more serious for Israel. And Meir was not on trial for corruption.

On the other hand, it is especially hard right now to imagine how Putin can be brought down by the Ukraine war. The battleground is at a stalemate. Anticipating breakthroughs has been discouraging. Yet Russian history of the past century and counting has seen unexpected lurches – the downfall of the czar in 1917 and the end of the USSR in 1991.

Overall, the fate of bullies is eventually to be beaten. Here’s a holiday toast to that.