He Ain't Shit
There’s a moment in the history of real courage—actual, physical and moral courage fused so tightly they become indistinguishable—that deserves to be held up every time Americans start to doubt the power of speaking up. It happened in January of 1945 in a German POW camp, when Master Sergeant Roddy Edmonds, a Tennessee kid who had never set out to be a hero, found himself facing a German officer with a Luger and an order: identify the Jewish American soldiers so they could be separated. Edmonds didn’t blink. “We are all Jews here,” he said, a man understanding what he controlled in that situation: himself. He put his life up as collateral for every soldier standing behind him. The German officer, after delivering threats of death, eventually walked off in a huff.
Edmonds died in 1985.
Donald Trump has spent a decade performing the same tired bully routine: inflate himself, intimidate the weak, hope that everyone mistakes volume for power. But finally, having a spine is in the air. Between Democratic lawmakers who are suddenly unafraid to call his bluff and even MTG, who went to the mattresses on child rape, America is seeing the limits of strongman cosplay, we are watching people finally understand the central truth of dealing with bullies: they can only swing at you if you stay small. If you stand up, they shrink. There’s no magic to it. It’s physics. It’s Edmonds telling a Nazi officer that the entire U.S. Army is Jewish today. It’s the bully realizing there’s no space left to shove.
Back when I was running VFRL, people would ask me constantly: “How can I help? What should I do?” They wanted some grand strategy, some high-stakes behind-the-scenes lever to pull. I always said the same thing: write an op-ed. Not because op-eds move mountains, I know mine didn’t, but because I wanted them to feel what it’s like to stand up in public and say, “No.” To put their name on something. To see that the giant in their head was made of cardboard. It was exposure therapy for authoritarianism. You say one thing out loud, in print, with your name on it, and suddenly Trump isn’t a monster, he’s a baby with a Twitter account and a habit of threatening people he can’t actually touch.
The only thing Americans are better at than violence is worrying about violence.
This is the great secret that Edmonds understood intuitively and that Americans, after years of handing over their lunch money, are rediscovering: bullies rely on your imagination. They thrive on your fear of retaliation, your fear of being singled out, your fear of being alone. The moment you decide you’re not alone, and decide to act as if you’re not, everything changes. The balance of power rearranges itself instantly.
Edmonds didn’t have institutional support. He didn’t have a political party backing him. He didn’t have a comms shop crafting statements and war-rooming potential fallout. He had a few hundred men behind him and the knowledge that silence would be a moral crime. Trump’s whole movement, by contrast, depends on people never noticing that they vastly outnumber him.
And so when MTG breaks from Trump, however erratically, and when Democrats stop mumbling and start saying plainly that the emperor has no clothes, we’re watching the facade crack. We’re watching people test the waters and discover, to their surprise, that nothing terrible happens when you say what everyone can see. The worst thing Trump can do is yell. And yelling only works on those who think they’re supposed to flinch.
After all, we’re a year into Trump 2.0, and take a wild guess how many American citizens he’s locked up?*
Roddy Edmonds showed the world that sometimes you end violence by refusing to participate in its premise. And in the American context, in 2025, the premise is simple: that Trump is powerful. That he can ruin you. That he holds the levers of fate. Say something publicly, and the spell breaks.
That’s what I wanted people at VFRL to feel. Once you’ve stood up once, once you’ve signed your name to a thought, you realize the bully never had the upper hand.
You did.
*Aside from the the accidental brown ones
Thank you for introducing me to Roddy Edmonds and his brave response to bullying. And kudos to Penn, for doing something similar: refusing to turn over lists of Jews to the Trump administration so they can “help” them. We are all Jews. We are all immigrants. We are all human beings.
Agree with 99.9% of what you said. The exception was the inference you obviously wanted to draw when stating “After all, we’re a year into Trump 2.0, and take a wild guess how many American citizens he’s locked up?” Unfortunately, he has locked up some US citizens during his outrageous ICE raids, albeit for a shorter amount of time while their citizenship was ultimately verified. But they were still locked up and held against their will. All because of the way they look or speak. And it wasn’t accidental.