Really? A letter writer in Wednesday’s Letters section of The Wall Street Journal thinks so. He credulously makes, though, a couple of critical mistakes that no rational, grown adult would make.

Today, Donald Trump’s “bullying” embodies the more contemporary meaning: the cowardly actions of one who seeks to harm or intimidate those he views as weak.

This is risible on its face. Bullies have only the power their putative victims choose to grant them, not a minim more. The cowardice is in those who make the decision to allow themselves to be bullied. Yes, that’s often a hard decision to make, but “hard” means “possible.” There’s no excuse for choosing wrongly here.

The letter writer’s other mistake centers on this—which he, in all seriousness, offers as an example of Trumpian bullying:

[T]he president has issued an executive order stripping security clearances from lawyers at Covington & Burling, who provided pro bono legal assistance to former special counsel Jack Smith. More recently, Ed Martin, interim US attorney for the District of Columbia, sent a letter to Georgetown Law School, demanding that it cease diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, and warning that his office wouldn’t hire the school’s graduates unless it did so.
These actions violate the First Amendment’s protections of freedom of expression.

This is laughable beyond anything related to “bullying” or being “bullied.” There is no intrinsic free speech right, or any other right, to a security clearances—which grants the holder access (given a parallel and simultaneous need to know) to data involving national security. Neither Covington & Burling as an institution, nor any of its lawyers, have any such right. It’s not bullying to rescind the clearances of those entities and persons who no longer work for the government.

Neither is there any intrinsic free speech right—or any other 1st Amendment right or any other right sourced to any other clause or clauses of our Constitution—to a government job. The government, like any potential employer, has its own intrinsic right to determine for itself the qualifications required for a job and then to determine for itself who the best candidate(s) might be to be hired into that job.

Nor is there any such right held by Georgetown Law School to place its graduates into any particular job, including a government one.

Back to the bullying foolishness: if Georgetown managers feel bullied by this, that’s their conscious choice. It would be particularly easy, though, for these worthies to stand up to the alleged Trumpian bullying. The Federal government’s authority to enforce any demand, whether to desist from DEI efforts or anything else, extends only so far as Georgetown Law School takes in Federal dollars. The institution is under no obligation to take those dollars. The school’s managers could eliminate the pressures they’ve chosen to perceive simply by ceasing those acceptances rather than ceasing their DEI efforts.