Worthless as gum on a boot heel
Bullying by Utah's Senator Lee and Trump among others
How did we end up with all the class bullies from the blacktop in Congress and the White House?
I’d like to direct them to Stopbullying.gov website. They need to learn a thing or two:
Verbal bullying is saying or writing mean things. Verbal bullying includes:
Name-calling
Taunting
Threatening to cause harm
Social bullying, sometimes referred to as relational bullying, involves hurting someone’s reputation or relationships. Social bullying includes:
Spreading rumors about someone
Embarrassing someone in public
Physical bullying involves hurting a person’s body or possessions. [edited]
But I guess, really what we are experiencing is a giant step further than what is explained on the StopBullying website. As Laura Barron-Lopez said on Apr 18, 2025, during the Washington Week show:
normalizing the populace to political violence is a trait of authoritarianism.”
During that Washington Week program, the discussion was over Sen. Lisa Murkowski telling voters in Alaska that she felt anxious about using her voice in Washington, "because retaliation is real." Well, this weekend, that was coldly demonstrated. Two Minnesota State leaders and their spouses—who should have been safe in their homes—were attacked. Two of the four were brutally murdered by a man who had no qualms about killing other families but still texted his wife that
There’s gonna be some people coming to the house armed and trigger-happy and I don’t want you guys around.
Somehow, don’t we all wish that someone had texted the families of the people he killed, warning them that there was a “trigger-happy” person out to get them?
According to Encyclopedia Britannica, authoritarianism in politics and government is
the blind submission to authority and the repression of individual freedom of thought and action. Authoritarian regimes are systems of government that have no established mechanism for the transfer of executive power and do not afford their citizens civil liberties or political rights. Power is concentrated in the hands of a single leader or a small elite, whose decisions are taken without regard for the will of the people.
This is what we are seeing with Trump and Republicans in Congress.
I’m particularly intent on pointing out the actions of Senator Mike Lee. Senator Lee, when he heard that a mother and father were murdered: shot to death, at their home, leaving two adult children parentless, made public posts with pictures of the perpetrator on his personal X account:
This is what happens When Marxists don’t get their way
Nightmare on Waltz Street
And yes, he was joking about their deaths. There is no doubt about it. Furthermore, he was blaming them for being murdered.
This behavior from a US Senator is what encourages others to physically bully to the level of shooting and killing innocent people with whom they don’t agree. Censure is is insufficient. He should be removed from office.
The following is the text of the letter, shared with The Salt Lake Tribune, that Minnesota’s U.S. Senator Tina Smith’s Deputy Chief of Staff Ed Shelleby said he sent to Senator Mike Lee about the killing of Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband:
I knew Melissa Hortman. Many people in this office did. She was a longtime friend of Senator Smith’s, who had seen her hours before she was murdered. So you’ll forgive my candor as I speak through enormous grief.
It is important for your office to know how much additional pain you’ve caused on an unspeakably horrific weekend….
But that is not the point. Why would you use the awesome power of a United States Senate Office to compound people’s grief? Is this how your team measures success? Using the office of US Senator to post not just one but a series of jokes about an assassination — is that a successful day of work on Team Lee? Did you come into the office Monday and feel proud of the work you did over the weekend?
Let’s recap Saturday so you fully understand what Minnesota was going through. Melissa Hortman and her husband were murdered. Sen. Hoffman and his wife were shot numerous times and remain hospitalized. By the grace of God it appears they will survive. Senators are discovered to be on a hit list of an armed man on the run — Senator Lee’s colleagues. And the decision of the office of Senator Mike Lee was not to publicly condemn the violence or to express condolences to her shattered children — it was to intimate that Melissa and Mark somehow deserved this? By making jokes? Did you have any consideration for the survivors in her family? For the Hoffmans in the hospital? For their families?
You exploited the murder of a lifetime public servant and her husband to post some sick burns about Democrats. Did you see this as an excellent opportunity to get likes and retweet[s]? Have you absolutely no conscience? No decency?
I applaud Ed Shelleby. These questions: “Have you absolutely no conscience? No decency?” are what 13 Million Americans asked when they stood up this past weekend and protested against Trump’s behaviors and his Republican enablers in Congress.
And we can definitely point to Senator Lee as an enabler. He is another of the “onetime anti-Trump evangelists” to switch sides and fall in line with Trump. He is demonstrably all-in for bullying, and “blind submission to authority!”
We are not just dealing with bullying. We have regular people being threatened, even as they exercise their First Amendment right to protest. Here’s an example from a woman living in Northern Idaho. While peacefully protesting, she faced armed counter protestors who were prepared to fire on her. [Note: This is a post from Threads. I am unsure how to link and worry for the person who wrote it!]
I’m having such emotional fallout from the tension of our No Kings protest in Coeur d’Alene. Processing the amount of energy it took to stay non-reactive while there were MAGA agitators on our side of the road, and MAGA counter protesters across the road armed with any number of large firearms strapped to them, fingers on the trigger. It was exhausting and had none of the relative party atmosphere I saw at the large city protests. Protesting in North Idaho is a labor of love of country.
There are many more than the 13 million who protested on Saturday against Trump who would have done so. However, they are in the midst of MAGA supporters and fear for their lives.
Still, like the 13 million who did protest, they are tired of seeing due process undermined by Trump, they are scandalized by his crypto-profiteering, his impounding of congressionally appropriated money (from NIH, the VA, EPA, to name a few), his venal personal vendettas, his incitement to violence, and his pardoning of violent insurrectionists. Federalizing the National Guard and sending the Marines against American citizens is par for his course.
This is not the America that most of us grew up in. We suffered through four years of this, got a break, but here we are again. And as we say down South, something smells bad enough to knock a dog off a gut wagon. The Republicans that are enabling him in Congress need to remember that there are many, many people opposed to Trump and his agenda.
Trump once boasted:
I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.
But now he has. Note the sparse number of observers and lack-luster participation in his military parade. And guess what, Congressional Republicans? You are, too.
Notes:
https://www.britannica.com/topic/authoritarianism
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/16/us/politics/mike-lee-minnesota-assassination-democrats.html
https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2025/06/16/minnesota-us-senate-staffer-sends/
https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2025/06/16/mineesota-shootinig-sen-amy/
https://www.fox9.com/news/minnesota-lawmakers-shooting-vance-boelter-texts-family-dad-went-war-last-night
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/17/opinion/trump-third-impeachment.html
https://www.threads.com
https://www.Stopbullying.gov