American history records some notorious criminals and ne’er-do-wells, but my favorite, who I learned about when I moved out west as a kid, might be a stagecoach robber on the frontier who was known as Black Bart. That wasn’t his real name – he was a dapper Englishman born with the name Charles Boles, who wore a bowler hat while doing stick-ups. He was a quite successful highwayman, but he is remembered especially because his trademark was writing poetry that he would leave behind at crime scenes, with the name “Black Bart” signed at the end.
Like, here’s one from 1878, found at the site of his holdup of a stage traveling to Oroville, California:
Here I lay me down to sleep
To wait the coming morrow,
Perhaps success, perhaps defeat,
And everlasting sorrow.
Let come what will, I'll try it on,
My condition can't be worse;
And if there's money in that box
'Tis munny in my purse.
— (signed) Black Bart[4]
No Shakespeare, mind you, but clever enough. And after learning about Black Bart as a kid, I always came to associate the name Bart with bad guys, which is why I was suspicious of a chubby kid a year ahead of me in elementary school whose name was Bart. This Bart was no criminal, as far as I know, but he was, in fact, a bully. Bully Bart’s daddy was rich, and the kid thought he could get away with about anything.
One day on the school playground, for no reason I could detect, Bully Bart came up to me, said, “You’re in my way,” and slapped me on the face. Not hard – just enough to sting. I didn’t know what to do: He was bigger and older, and it struck me as quite likely that he would hit me again if I didn’t skedaddle. So I did.
And even though it seemed unfair, because I hadn’t done anything to fairly deserve Bully Bart’s threats, I stayed out of his way for the rest of the school year: Every time he would even look my way, I would find a reason to turn around. Finally summer vacation arrived, after which Bully Bart, thankfully, headed to a new school (or maybe to a juvenile reformatory, for all I know).
I bring this up today because of the great threat posed by another rich-kid-turned-bully, this one named Donald Trump. He is quite effective at getting people to change direction in the face of his threats – even when the provocation is something he imagines, and when the slap he threatens is clearly unfair.
As a journalist, I’m especially concerned about what Trump is doing to free speech in America. An awful lot of people are running scared, as I did when I faced a bully. Big law firms are giving Trump’s causes hundreds of millions of dollars of free work because the president threatened to ruin their business if they didn’t; great universities are giving up some cherished independence based on an intrusive, bullying federal government.
And then there’s James Comey, the former FBI director. He got on Trump’s bad side years ago, in part by warning about the threat that Trump poses to American democracy. Recently Comey reposted a photo he found online, showing a bunch of shells on a beach spelling out “86 - 47” – which Trump’s fans claimed was somehow not just an insult to the 47th president (you know, “86” him, meaning “get rid of” him), but a physical threat. So now the Secret Service and the Department of Homeland Security are investigating Comey, and the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, says he should be in jail. Bullies always have their enforcers, you know. So Comey is rightly scared – and he has apologized for any misunderstanding.
To be clear, posting a photo is an expression of free speech. But putting the ex-FBI director under investigation is a warning that might stop other people from suggesting anything untoward about Trump.
There’s a bigger threat to the news media. Trump is suing CBS News for $20 billion based on how “60 Minutes” edited an interview in October with Kamala Harris. Legal experts say the lawsuit is baseless – even silly, actually. No way could it succeed in court. But Paramount, the parent company of CBS, needs Trump administration approval for a merger that could bring in billions of dollars. So Paramount is apparently on the verge of paying tens of millions of dollars to Trump to settle the lawsuit. The president of CBS and the Executive Producer of “60 Minutes” have both quit to protest this threat to journalistic independence. But ABC settled a similarly baseless lawsuit and paid out millions. So now the bully seems on the verge of winning this one, too.
That’s what happens when people yield to bullying. It just encourages the bully. It’s why we all need to find backbone.
There have been countless other examples of Trump bullying to curtail free speech. International students have been arrested over their pro-Palestinian comments or writing. Trump has signed an executive order demanding investigations of two former officials who spoke out against him after his first term. And after a demonstration outside an immigration detention center last week, a Democratic member of Congress was arrested – never mind the First Amendment’s specific protection of the right to assembly.
In fact, the First Amendment was drafted explicitly to stop the government from using its vast power to punish or suppress expression that it doesn’t like. But standing up for free speech in the face of this sort of intimidation can take money and time and courage. And that can be hard to come by when the bully has such power as the President of the United States does.
It’s a crime, what Donald Trump is doing. Maybe not a literal crime, like sticking up a stagecoach. But the bullying that characterizes the assault on free speech by this administration is a crime against the freedom that has made America’s place in the world unique for the past 250 years.
There’s no poetry in what he’s doing – Donald Trump is no Black Bart, you see – but it’s clear that like my tormentor six decades back, the rich daddy’s kid is a bully, and he has found that he can get away with it. So it feels. Like Black Bart is in the house – the White House, that is. I didn’t stand up to the bully when I was a kid, but we all need to do better now, because the stakes are so high.
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.