Presidential Language Linked to School Bullying

Feb 14, 2020, 4:31 PM

(from the Washington Post) Since President Trump’s rise to the nation’s highest office, his inflammatory language — often condemned as racist and xenophobic — has seeped into schools across America, according to recent reporting by the Washington Post. Many bullies now target other children differently than they used to, with kids as young as 6 mimicking the president’s insults and the cruel way he delivers them.

Trump’s words, those chanted by his followers at campaign rallies and even his last name have been wielded by students and school staff members to harass children more than 300 times since the start of 2016, a Washington Post review of 28,000 news stories found. An average of nearly two incidents per school week have been publicly reported over the past four years. At least three-quarters of the attacks were directed at kids who are Hispanic, black or Muslim. Students have also been victimized because they support the president — more than 45 times during the same period. Because so much of the bullying never appears in the news, The Post’s figure represents a small fraction of the actual total. It also doesn’t include the thousands of slurs, swastikas and racial epithets that aren’t directly linked to Trump but that the president’s detractors argue his behavior has exacerbated.