William Hogarth:
The Sleeping Congregation
(1728)

"…[This world] ultimately hardly notices any bully's passing comments."

It seems fitting that a Progressive President coined the term Bully Pulpit. Teddy used it to describe how the Presidency served as a platform from which to advocate his positions on issues of his day. Since then, subsequent presidents have employed that pulpit with varying degrees of effectiveness. From it, we’ve heard one incumbent insist that he was not a crook, a self-inflicted Comeuppance that spread a tad too effectively for his incumbency’s longevity. We’ve been invited to dream bigger and to grieve together, and had grown used to paying at least a little closer attention when any odd incumbent took to their bully podium, at least we used to. Then, our incumbent took office and reframed the meaning and significance of both the office and that pulpit. He took to using it to spread venomous lies and deliberate misrepresentations, hate speech, and the crudest provocations, transforming that once august platform into something a little worse than a gutter. Teddy’s reliable Bully Platform transformed into a glittering Fool’s Gold Bully’s one.

The switch sure seemed to work at first. The world would quake when our incumbent started in on another of his signature hateful tirades. I would cower right along with the next one, for I had been trained—entrained—through decades of repetition to expect something to result from anything so proudly proclaimed from that august platform. We soon enough discovered that we could safely ignore that man who really should have been standing behind a curtain when making such proclamations; by then, he had come to seem just as shameful as his messaging. He sowed little more or less than chaos, which he insisted upon refreshing nearly every morning. The messages degraded themselves into absolute incoherence. He could make his partisan Congress dance, and sometimes, seemingly, his not-so-supreme Court, but the opposition became emboldened, ending up by burying his party in the gratefully inevitable midterms.

Now, our incumbent seems to rail against the sky itself, suddenly impotently and without purpose. His bully’s trance has lost its authority, and almost nobody can hear whatever he so passionately screams from that now sorry balcony. He mostly simply contradicts himself while blinding his potential audience with the meaningless but showy bling with which he violated that consecrated place. The bully screams at sheep from there, but not even the most skittish sheep seems moved by the greatest or the least of his screeching. He forfeited even that place’s considerable positional power. He rails purposelessly now, wasting the greatest opportunity anyone inherits, making threats that move no one and increasingly cowering himself in a seemingly defensive crouch, well on his way to becoming little more than an especially annoying fly on the wall of history.

So it has always been with bullies. They might start all noisy and scary, but inevitably end up somewhere slightly worse than standard obsolescence, for they were once believed to be something significant. The height from which his opportunity ultimately fell will replace whatever significance might have otherwise been gleaned from whatever our bully once proclaimed from that pulpit. The pulpit will return to its previous Bully status; once the bully’s bullshit wears off, and that bully’s long gone. I’m amazed I ever felt the least bit threatened by the noise and hollow spectacle he projected from there. Let this be a cautionary tale, reminding me that the noisy only rarely ever very deeply influence anything except their own passing, and that, only in passing. The sonic booms did not represent power so much as the depth of the bully’s cowering while standing in the place with the most positional power. He was saying that he couldn’t cope with the gift he’d stumbled into, and could only waste his greatest opportunity in annoying irrelevance.

I proclaim from my considerably less-than-Bully Pulpit that the next time I encounter a Bully attempting to intimidate me into submission from their pulpit, I will ignore them. I resolve to pay little attention to his messaging, understanding that it’s likely evidence of poorly concealed desperation. Were he confident, he wouldn’t feel he needed to resort to threatening, demeaning messages. He could engage in quiet discourse to better inspire those he desired to follow him. He wouldn’t feel the need to coerce his congregation into compliance, or convince anyone with anything other than calming reason. The sparks and noise offer clear evidence of ill-fitting parts and an underlying incongruence. The world steadfastly refuses to change in response to threats. It quickly forgets them. This world remembers reassurances confidently delivered from a proper Bully Pulpit: A Chicken In Every Pot, and We Shall Overcome, and ultimately hardly notices any bully’s passing comments.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Comeuppance, #PureSchmaltz