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Just recently, in an op-ed responding to his threatened 25% tariffs on Canadian goods (now postponed a month), the Toronto Star's editorial board labeled Donald Trump a "bully." Indeed, there probably couldn't be a more accurate descriptive word for him. Its concluding paragraph read this way:

"These Canadians understand what all of us must now grasp: No one has ever won by appeasing a bully. No one has ever won by negotiating with a knife to their throat. But again and again, battles have been won by those who were counted out, who had no right to survive, never mind thrive, but did because they found strength in each other and a shared commitment to ideals and together did the hard work necessary to overcome. It has never been harder to band together despite our differences, and never more important."

At 80, I must admit that there's something deeply painful about having a bully as president of my country and, accompanying him, in a totally made-up Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) that's only growing more powerful by the day, the richest man in the world, Elon Musk. He is himself, of course, both distinctly a bully and increasingly moving the already right-wing Trumpist movement to greater extremes, even as he's tried to close down the U.S. Agency for International Development and so shut off any decent American aid to anyone in trouble anywhere on this planet.

If anything, Trump and (at least for now) his buddy (Heil, Musk!) are redefining what it means to be a bully in a country that still passes (even if barely) for a democracy. So, it seemed all too appropriate that only recently this 80-year-old guy sat down and read former New York Times sportswriter and TomDispatch regular Bob Lipsyte's latest young adult novel, Rhino's Run. It's about a high-school football player who fears being bullied and throws an impulsive punch at a teammate's jaw and what follows. Despite my age, his striking new work gripped me in a distinctly youthful fashion that I'll continue to savor (before I pass the book on to my grandson).

And while you're thinking about whether to get the book for anyone you know (or yourself), check out Lipsyte's thoughts on how to deal with the bully who, for the second time in our life (even if only by 49.7% of the vote), is president of these ever less united states of ours. Tom

How to Bump, Lump, Crumple, and Eventually Dump Donald Trump

By Robert Lipsyte

In bad times -- and these are bad times -- I call up the spirit of Willie.

Willie has seen me through cancer, divorce, and deaths in the family. His memory has given me the courage and strength to push on when I wanted to give up and hide. Willie reminds me that, even at 87, I can take it, get back up, survive, sometimes even win.

Willie was my bully. When I was 12, he beat me up or at least threatened to do so almost every day.

Trump is my bully now. Even though I share the misery he spreads with millions of others, it somehow seems personal because he makes me feel so vulnerable, so hopeless, so at the end of my version of the American dream. And, of course, everything he does evokes Willie.

I recognized each of them as bullies the first time we met. I was a journalist in my early forties, in the late 1970s, when I initially interviewed Donald Trump for CBS Sunday Morning. I took him for an amusing buffoon. He was around 35 then. Obviously lying to me, it was clear that he had a certain oily allure. People considered him harmless, a loser supported by his dad. He didn't scare me. After Willie, few ever did. But even then the swagger was unmistakable, the flat-voiced, dead-eyed affect, the lack of humane connection. From that first moment, I knew he was a predator.

Enter Willie

At 12, I was terrified by Willie, who spotted me early in seventh grade as an after-school target. There I was, fat, meek, and lugging a heavy leather bookbag. In my junior high school's permissive climate, some roughhousing was tolerated to let the bullies drain off energy and ease the teachers' day. I was in a class for the "gifted," identified by those bags full of books we carried from class to class (that were all too easily kicked out of our hands).