Why do bullies get away with what they do and what will it take to stop them? Their secret weapon, it seems to me, is the audacious act. The snatching of the apple from the quiet kid’s lunch box and taking a bite, a big bite right in his face. Then laughing at the look on his victim’s countenance. And doing this in front of his friends and classmates. And what do they do? Nothing. They are paralyzed. They can’t move. They are frozen in place by the audacious act. It is so unexpected and so contrary to the rules of decency that they simply have no response.

That is the bully’s secret weapon.

That it seems to me is what Trump and his fellow bullies are doing on an international stage on nearly a daily basis. Most recently, Trump thought it would be fun, I suppose, to represent President Barrack Obama and his wife on his Truth Social internet account as apes. Their faces were superimposed on the bodies of monkeys. An almost institutionalized racist image. And this occurred during Black History Month — a time you would think racists might

lay low. But no, he even tried to defend it all by saying it was intended to show Trump as king of the jungle and Democrats as characters from The Lion King.

So, if the first audacious act doesn’t stun the crowd into paralysis, give them a bigger one. Then sit back and wait for the gasp.

And Trump is our bully child. We’ve already allowed him to paralyze us for a year with one audacious act after another, while we wring our hands and decry his behavior but do nothing to stop him. He and his thugs have collapsed all the internal protections that were in place to stop such behavior. They were in place but never tested. Until now, and now we have so far failed that part of the American democratic experiment that recognizes what the bully is doing when he commits his audacious acts and stops him.

So far, we are paralyzed.

What is the rallying cry that will move us (the classmates who so far have just watched with stunned looks on our faces) to use the instruments we have constitutionally available to us and stop this silly, pathetic and very dangerous bully and his thugs? And who will be the first to sound the alarm with enough conviction and standing to move the rest of us to action? And what is he or she or they waiting for? Everyday, we arrive at a fresh example of audaciousness.

Stunning audaciousness.

We suppose, I guess, our secret weapon is the elections. Maybe. But the mid-terms are months away, and the potential damage that our Thug-in-Chief can do in those months — both at home and internationally — is enormous. I have only one tool — my words. And I’m willing to use them. But I’m not sure they’re powerful enough; and I fear that right now, they are no more than the small cry of a bewildered writer in the middle of a dark world, wondering how as a country, a nationality, a civilized species we have come to accept a bully’s audaciousness as the new norm.