Trump the Bully: I found the literary character the president resembles most [View all]

[DemocratSinceBirth]

Writers have fracked the literary canon in search of a character who best resembles Donald Trump. Is he Richard III? Nah, Richard III was witty and Trump isn’t. Is he Willie Stark, the protagonist from Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men? There’s a passing resemblance, but Willie was a drunk and a life-long pol; Trump’s a teetotaler in office for the first time. Lonesome Rhodes from A Face in the Crowd? The TV demagoguery fits, but Rhodes was never a candidate. Bane from The Dark Knight Rises, whom Trump quoted in his inaugural speech? Or is Trump an amalgam of characters out of Mark Twain?

My explorations of the canon for Trump’s literary antecedent sent me back to one of my favorite writers, novelist Stanley Elkin. Elkin’s short story “A Poetics for Bullies” from the April 1965 issue of Esquire, which also appeared in his Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers collection, anticipated the irritable mental gestures (to pinch a phrase) that define the 45th president of the United States. The story’s protagonist is a high-schooler, perhaps an older middle-schooler, who goes by the name of Push the Bully, who introduces himself in the first paragraph thusly:

I’m Push the bully, and what I hate are new kids and sissies, dumb kids and smart, rich kids, poor kids, kids who wear glasses, talk funny, show off, patrol boys and wise guys and kids who pass pencils and water the plants—and cripples, especially cripples. I love nobody loved.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/01/trump-the-bully-214698