Alex Pretti was a strong man. An ICU nurse at the VA, he showed up every day with courage and care, standing by veterans on the precipice of death. Brave, kind, generous, he had skills that could save lives and the presence to accompany people through the heaviest moments at the end of life. When not at work, he hiked the beautiful nature of Minnesota with a beaming smile. He was the kind of man every parent dreams of raising, the kind of neighbor who makes a community feel like home. He was a real man.

On Saturday, January 24th, when not on the job, Alex showed up to a protest to bear witness. Just weeks after Renee Nicole Good was murdered, and then smeared as a terrorist by the Trump administration despite video evidence of her peaceful protest, Alex knew that recording was essential. He understood what we all must: that witnessing is an act of patriotism, a constitutional duty to hold power accountable when they try to twist reality before our eyes. When he saw a woman accosted by thugs, he went to help her. He stood between her and the attackers, one hand in the air and the other holding a phone to record. He was pushed to the ground and shot ten times. He was murdered, executed publicly.

The thugs who pushed her down, who executed him in front of dozens of witnesses who recorded every second, they are not strong. They are cowards. The soulless man who sat on a toilet in a marble bathroom in the White House in the middle of the night spreading lies about Alex on social media is not strong. He is a coward. This is what cowardice looks like: destroying thousands of lives of public servants who maintain our quality of life, trampling on the Constitution repeatedly, throwing our global standing into uncertainty threatening war on allies, unabashedly brandishing Nazi ideology. These are the acts of the past year of Trump’s administration, not of strength, but of pathetic weakness. This backward, weak, unimaginative, soulless being is not a strongman. Trump is the weakest, most pathetic man this country has ever known.

Trump and any other leader who attacks communities that sustain our collective wellbeing are the weakest, most pathetic, spineless people in the world.

Stop Calling Cowards Strong

As we fumble for ways to understand the current global political moment, scholars and political analysts have guided our collective attention toward the "strongman" type of leadership. Putin, Orbán, Bolsonaro, Trump, and many others who follow ethics of domination and oppression are placed under this banner, this political framework. Given what we are seeing in the United States, I believe it is dangerous to keep using such a false descriptor of these dynamics of dehumanization. These men are not strong. Their violence is not power; it is the telltale marker of weakness. They resort to brutality because they possess no moral authority, no true courage, no capacity to lead through anything but fear.

Trump and any other leader who attacks communities that sustain our collective wellbeing are the weakest, most pathetic, spineless people in the world. Trying to understand what we are experiencing now through the language of "strongmen" is dangerous and inaccurate. We have to name reality with more intention. Men deserve better than this. People are raising boys into beautiful, strong men like Alex Pretti. In Trump, in Steven Miller, and the thugs who carry out their unconstitutional orders, we are seeing cowards who are so weak that they must destroy humanity because they cannot stand their own emptiness.

I Have Seen This Before, Many of Us Have

I think often about my childhood in Romania these days. My mom telling me about her beloved mentor who was disappeared because he held views that were dangerous to the dictator's fragile sense of self. I think about my dad who was tortured, whose body and spirit never recovered. I think about the pathetic leader who built monstrous palaces while his people starved, who paraded in fur coats while we scrounged for clothes from bins donated by German churches.

Ceaușescu turned neighbors against one another through a system of informants. Neighbors received special favors, maybe a bag of flour when no one else had any, to report any dissent in the neighborhood. A few people around Ceaușescu, the corrupt politicians, got richer and richer the more we were undernourished and the more our future was uncertain. They were untouchable. The Epstein files have made clear this too is a reality here: one system of justice for the powerful, another for the rest of........

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