The president-elect’s boorishness allegedly fired up a new generation of bullies to pick on their peers’ essential insecurities—a phenomenon doomily dubbed the “Trump Effect.”
According to Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail and the indelible authority of the folks at Politifact, who found her assertions “mostly true,” impressionable young people across the country tormented each other with a renewed zeal this year, all thanks to Donald Trump.
But recent data collected by Politico challenges this popular myth. There is no sign of an uptick in bullying, and racially-motivated meanness has been on a steady downturn according to the Education Department’s civil rights office:
Turns out the “Trump Effect” was never supported by hard data.
Its emergence as a panicky talking point followed from a report published last spring by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The SPLC report, called “The Trump Effect,” is Politifact’s principal source for “fact-checking” Clinton’s, and by extension her best Hollywood surrogate’s, credit to the ur-bully.
The conclusions of the SPLC’s report depend on unsolicited responses to an online survey, emailed to educators who subscribe to a “Teaching Tolerance” mailing list. The self-selecting sample testified that they and their students were “terrified” of Trump and the band of bullies whose bad behavior he rhetorically “normalized.” Because of course they did.
But bad behavior—as newly reported data, and our collective memories of seventh grade attest—was already normal in schools. (Hence the thin-skinned president-elect’s rarely disputed likeness to a schoolyard bully.) If Scut Farkus weren’t in detention for hurling Trumpian slurs, chances are he’d be there for some equal or greater offense. And now, for four or eight years, he can blame the President of the United States for inducing his delinquency.
