Alex Pretti Was a Strong Man. Trump Is a Coward
The actions of the Trump administration have shown not signs 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.
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 us. Different rules. Different accountability. Different worlds.
Your neighbor who checks on the elderly woman next door every morning. Your co-worker who goes to immigration court to bear witness. The man at the grocery store who remembers everyone’s birthdays and makes them handmade cards. These are strong people.
My parents risked everything, my father's body and mind bore the scars of torture until his last breath, so that I could live in a place where I could speak freely, think freely, question power without fear. To see that precious dream of freedom, bought with their blood and sacrifice, now being crushed by what increasingly resembles the Securitate, Romania's secret police, is a betrayal beyond words. To live these things all over again, yet with more vivid brutality than I ever imagined, is unspeakably painful to describe. People are being disappeared. The pathetic, spineless monster is building his palaces while loving, generous neighbors are being murdered in the streets. ICE is recruiting people by offering bonuses, turning our neighbors into spineless thugs too, just as Ceaușescu's informants were recruited with bags of flour.
Ceaușescu was a spineless coward building his palace around him. My grandfather, who went into the fields every day and raised the chickens and pigs that kept me alive, he was strong, he was a strong man. My dad, who risked his life to escape authoritarianism because he believed that somewhere a place existed where I could speak my mind freely, he too was brave and strong. Your grandfather who worked double shifts so his children could go to college. Your neighbor who checks on the elderly woman next door every morning. Your co-worker who goes to immigration court to bear witness. The man at the grocery store who remembers everyone’s birthdays and makes them handmade cards. These are strong people. These are real men and women. This is what strength looks like.
What True Power Looks Like
Frantz Fanon, the Martinican psychiatrist and philosopher, wrote that unless colonial structures are radically overturned, any decolonization that just swaps elites leaves intact a brittle, violent form of power built on the permanent dehumanization of the masses. This is what we see now: brittle, violent power terrified of true strength. Fanon understood that we cannot simply replace one set of elites with another, we must radically overturn the structures themselves. This is what we are called to do now: refuse to reinforce systems that reward spineless cowards with authority, and instead build the world Alex Pretti died protecting. A world where showing up for your neighbor is valued more than hoarding wealth. Where recording truth is patriotism. Where welcoming immigrants and refugees, people like my father, welcoming little boys like Liam Conejo Ramos, fleeing authoritarianism in search of freedom, strengthens rather than threatens our communities. Where offering sanctuary is recognized as the strength it is, not twisted into a crime. Where collective wellbeing matters more than individual domination. Trump and his thugs are terrified of this vision. They are terrified of Renee Good smiling instead of cowering. They are terrified of Alex Pretti walking toward thugs to make sure a woman is not brutalized by them. They are weak cowards.
Trump and his thugs, and other thugs like that anywhere in the world, are afraid of true power. They are afraid of our true power, our true strength. They are terrified of Alex Pretti, someone who embodied true strength, who was skilled, kind, and moral. Because true power exposes them for what they are: morally corrupt, spineless, empty, weak thugs.
Strongmen do not have power of over us. They are afraid of us. It is time for us as a collective to remember what true power is. We are strong. We, who care for each other, are strong. They are weak. They are pathetic. And they know it.
The strength we have, the strength we see in the community members who rush toward a 16-year old child who is abducted by ICE and thrown out of the van after being brutalized, the clergy who kneeled in protest at the airport, the strength we see embodied in Alex Pretti walking to protect a woman being brutalized by thugs, that strength is not rare, it is the fabric of our communities. It has always been here, quietly holding us together while cowards build palaces and spread lies. It is time we recognize this power for what it is: unstoppable, abundant, and ours. We are strong. We, who care for each other, are strong. This is real strength. And it is ours.
Mitchell Zimmerman is shown as a SNCC volunteer in Arkansas in 1966. (Photo by Brian Rybolt, a fellow member of Arkansas SNCC. Used with permission.)
