The arrogant young woman
Trump didn’t just start bullying individuals via Twitter yesterday. Oh no. More than a year ago, for instance, he went on Twitter to attack a college student for daring to ask him a question at a political forum.
In October 2015, then-18-year-old Lauren Batchelder asked Trump a question at a political forum in New Hampshire. “So, maybe I’m wrong, maybe you can prove me wrong, but I don’t think you’re a friend to women,” she said. Trump defended himself, and Batchelder took the mic again, asking if she’d get equal pay and access to abortion with Trump as president. Trump answered: “You’re going to make the same if you do as good of a job, and I happen to be pro-life, okay?”
Batchelder thought that was the end of it, but when she woke up the next day, she realized that the current president-elect had sent out a series of tweets about her. “The arrogant young woman who questioned me in such a nasty fashion at No Labels yesterday was a Jeb staffer!” he tweeted. (Batchelder is not, and has never been, a staffer for Jeb Bush, though she did volunteer for his campaign.) His followers replied with screenshots of Batchelder and posted her phone number and other personal information online.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/653897939933364224
He’s every bit the Twitter bully that any fan of Breitbart is, but multiplied by several million because of who he is. Bullying is exploiting some form of advantage to attack and dominate people. Bullying is the opposite of a fair competition. It’s shocking and revolting that Trump has zero inhibitions about exploiting his enormous advantages to attack and dominate, and threaten, harm, intimidate, and silence ordinary citizens.
Within hours, her phone began to ring, and her email inbox and Facebook account filled with threatening messages. “I didn’t really know what anyone was going to do,” Batchelder, now 19, told the Washington Post. “He was only going to tweet about it and that was it, but I didn’t really know what his supporters were going to do, and that to me was the scariest part.”
She said the abuse has continued, prompting one Trump supporter to send her a Facebook message five days before the election that read, “Wishing I could fucking punch you in the face. id then proceed to stomp your head on the curb and urinate in your bloodied mouth and i know where you live, so watch your fucking back punk.”
Batchelder’s case illustrates what happens when Trump, who has more than 17 million Twitter followers, goes after a private citizen online.
It illustrates what happens when he does that before he’s the President-elect. It’s not getting better now that he is.
“I think there are good things about {the internet} but there are also aspects that concern and worry me………direct face-to-face contact is an extremely important part of human life. It helps develop self-understanding and the growth of a healthy personality.
You just have a different relationship to somebody when you’re looking at them than you do when you’re punching away at a keyboard. ……..I suspect that extending that kind of abstract and remote relationship. …….is going to have unpleasant effects. ……it will diminish their humanity, I think”
Noam Chomsky. Secrets, Lies and Democracy. 1994.
Or, as Der Trumpf would say; if you can’t say it to her face, hit ‘er with twitter.
Bullying an 18-year-old college student for daring to try to learn…that’s horrifying. I went to dozens of these things when I was a student, I asked a lot of questions, not obsequious or cloying, and often disagreeing with the speaker. I have questioned speakers across the spectrum and have NEVER experienced something like this. The speakers were varying degrees of polite, ranging from basically polite to very helpful and willing to answer the question. They answered the question they wanted me to ask more often than not, but that’s normal for politicians. None of them…I repeat NONE of them…every sicced their followers on me for even a day, let alone more than a year.
Who does this… this girl think she is? She had the temerity to speak to him with so little deference? To presume to have different opinions and values from Dear Leader?
Until recently, I would have thought a fear of public speaking would be the only thing dissuading most people from taking the mic at a public forum. That’s being replaced by a much more real fear this time.
Twitter has given the cretin-elect a far more effective way of silencing dissenters than the old Bush-era tactics of screening or planting questioners. He can focus on any individual he wants to make an example of, and just sit back while his millions of followers “work towards the fuhrer”, far beyond the capability of any other twitter bully. It will take a lot of courage to stick one’s head above the parapet from here on in. Scary shit.
I’ve done lots of talks in front of big audiences. More than a hundred, certainly. And I *hate* it. I’ve always hated it. I hated it at school, I hated it at university and I’ve hated it every single time I had to do it in professional and otherwise belligerent life. For me, it’s a big deal to talk about something I care about in front of an audience. I do it because – presumably – I hate myself as much as I care about the things I say.
I say this because I also don’t like asking questions when I’m part of an audience. There are lots of reasons: part of me feels sorry for the person doing the talk; part of me expects the question I’m asking to be stupid; another part worries that I’m taking up time that could be used for a better question. Part of me feels that I’ll fuck up asking the question and make a fool of myself.
I know I’m not alone. Asking questions can be really hard and extremely stressful even if you *really know* what you’re talking about.
Attacking someone for asking questions you don’t like is one of the worst kinds of bullying there is. It feeds on the fact that asking a question in such a public place is already difficult and is clearly intended to make it more difficult. Where have we seen *that* before?
But more recently there are two horrible developments:
1. People who feel the need to terrorise people they disagree with, and
2. Spin doctors and politicians who have learned to use this tendency to bewilderingly effective effect..
This is what we’re dealing with: a politician who can make an individual’s life intolerable if she dares to tweet.
Don’t you dare tell me that Trump doesn’t understand this. It’s why he does it. It seems like the only thing he does.