Bully pulpit

Reader question:

Please explain “The impact of Trump and his bully’s pulpit”.

My comments:

The strong influence of US President Trump and his presidency, in other words.

Good or bad – especially bad, judging from the specific wording of “bully’s pulpit”.

Bully’s pulpit, you see, is a word play on the phrase “bully pulpit”, which originally means the good and great platform of the American presidency, pulpit originally referring to the platform on which a preacher stands to deliver a sermon in a church.

Bully as an adjective is seldom in use today. More commonly in use today is the bully as noun, referring to someone who, for example, uses his big body to push smaller people around. Any schoolyard has a bully who beats up smaller pupils.

Trump being the bully that he is, it is apt for someone to turn his “bully pulpit” into his “bully’s pulpit” and have a little fun with it. In reality, of course, that’s how Trump uses his bully pulpit – to bully people into submission rather to use reason and persuasion.

The coinage of bully pulpit, by the way, is attributed to Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919), who was the 26th president of the United States, as PoliticalDictionary.com explains:

The phrase bully pulpit is attributed to President Theodore Roosevelt, who exclaimed the words in response to critics of his leadership style.

Roosevelt said: “I suppose my critics will call that preaching, but I have got such a bully pulpit” as he wrote an address to Congress.

Roosevelt often used the adjective “bully” to describe an event or action that was good or entertaining. The noun pulpit refers to a raised stand used for readings during religious ceremonies.

The bully pulpit in Roosevelt’s mind wasn’t about pummeling legislators with presidential authority; rather, he believed the president could encourage the public to push their legislators on behalf of his agenda.

All right, let’s read a few media examples of “bully pulpit” in various situations:

1. The groping of Mexico President Claudia Sheinbaum on a downtown street shone a bright light on the gender violence women face every day, but the country’s political polarization has tarnished what under other circumstances would seem a natural moment for national solidarity, analysts say.

The president has tried to use the assault to send a clear message that such behavior is not acceptable. She has explained why she decided to press charges against the drunk man; she used her bully pulpit to pressure the remaining states that don’t have sexual harassment on the books as a crime; and she talked about the need to make it easier for women to report such crimes.

But almost immediately political opponents accused her of using the incident to distract from another burning issue in Mexico: political violence. The previous weekend, a popular mayor in the western state of Michoacan was gunned down in public during Day of the Dead festivities. Protests against the violence were happening in several cities in the state and Sheinbaum was under pressure to offer new solutions for the state’s persistent violence.

Opposition politicians went so far as to suggest that her assault was “staged” to change the narrative.

Ceci Flores, the leader of a collective of relatives searching for disappeared loved ones, who has clashed before with the administration, wrote bitterly on X that “our president only needed a few meters outside the palace to become a victim. That’s the Mexico that we all walk every day: if we’re lucky it’s assault, if we’re not they kill or disappear us.”

Sen. Alejandro Moreno, leader of the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party, condemned violence against women, but in the same breath accused Sheinbaum’s Morena party of using the incident as a “political distraction” from the mayor’s killing.

Uruapan Mayor Carlos Alberto Manzo Rodríguez was killed last Saturday, shot by a 17-year-old who died at the scene, in what authorities said was an organized crime plot. On Wednesday, his widow met with Sheinbaum at the National Palace and later was sworn in to finish out his term.

On Tuesday, Sheinbaum was walking from the National Palace to the Education Ministry for a meeting when she stopped to speak with some citizens. A video showed that with her back turned an obviously inebriated man put his arm around her, then touched her body with his hands and leaned in for kiss.

The morning before her assault, Sheinbaum had announced a new security plan for Michoacan that included sending more troops, but also doubling down on efforts to address the root causes of violence.

- Mexico president’s rivals cry foul as she uses groping incident to address gender violence, The Associated Press, November 7, 2025.

2. It’s time to “get back to basics” in math, Gov. Kathy Hochul says as she calls for sensible curricular and instruction changes.

She’s right; too bad she has zero power over New York’s education apparatus.

Progressive “reforms” last century put control of the State Education Department (SED) in the hand of a Board of Regents appointed by a complicated process that now effectively lets the speaker of the state Assembly call the shots.

And Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie had to mortgage his soul to the teachers unions and miscellaneous lefty ideologues to get the votes to become speaker back in 2015 – so good sense and hard fact have nothing to do with how SED steers K-12 education.

So all Hochul can do is push legislation requiring SED to offer best practices for teaching math and guidance on selecting math curricula; even if that law passes, she can’t stop the educrats from defining “best practices” however they like.

If the government really wanted to help, she’d use her bully pulpit to embarrass SED into rescinding idiocy like its recent math guidelines telling teachers to stop giving timed quizzes because they overstress some kids.

Better yet, she’d hector the Regents into admitting that top charter schools blow the regular public schools away on state and national math tests, and mandating that poor-performing districts adopt the “best practices” of those charters.

She might also call out new NYC Chancellor Kamar Samuels for pushing to “improve” high- and middle-school math instruction barely 18 months after Mayor Eric Adams’ team introduced his solid NYC Solves math reforms.

- Gov. Hochul’s ‘back to basics’ call in math instruction is further evidence of State Ed’s lack of accountability, NYPost.com, January 22, 2026.

3. After President Donald Trump used his bully pulpit in Davos, Switzerland, to demand “the acquisition of Greenland by the United States – just as we have acquired many other territories throughout our history” – and then backed down on the same day, many officials here see a lesson for the European Union: Pushing back works.

The brazen ultimatum – give up Greenland or face tariffs – elicited a level of unity that largely had eluded the leaders of the 27-nation E.U. in the year since Trump’s second inauguration.

Trump’s gambit for Greenland, an autonomous territory of NATO ally Denmark, bonded some unlikely partners in opposition: Europe’s mainstream political establishment with populist and nationalist parties; Republicans and Democrats in the deeply partisan U.S. Congress; the mostly Indigenous people of Greenland with their Danish former colonizers; and the E.U. and Britain, the only country ever to quit the bloc.

For advocates of taking a tougher line with Trump, the president’s climbdown regarding the strategic Arctic territory was proof that retaliation – not conciliation – is the answer to his hardball tactics. After accommodating Trump on trade and on arming Ukraine, the Europeans finally stood up to him. Even more significantly, Trump backed down.

“When we stand together, and when we are clear and strong, also in our willingness to stand up for ourselves, then the results will show,” Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen told reporters in Brussels on Thursday night. “I think we have learned something during the last couple of days and weeks, and now we, of course, want to find a solution.”

A chorus of European leaders insisted they would not be blackmailed. They blasted Trump’s crusade to grab land from a NATO ally as “unacceptable” and “inexplicable.” The E.U. threatened its own tariffs on American goods. And resolve grew within the bloc to unleash a trade retaliation tool it had long hesitated to use, which could target U.S. services in Europe – a profit center for American companies in which they benefit from a big surplus.

The solidarity from across Europe, Frederiksen said, “was extremely important in this very difficult situation.”

- On Greenland, Europe stood up, Trump blinked, and the E.U. learned a lesson, WashingtonPost.com, January 23, 2026.

本文仅代表作者本人观点，与本网立场无关。欢迎大家讨论学术问题，尊重他人，禁止人身攻击和发布一切违反国家现行法律法规的内容。

About the author:

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.

（作者：张欣）