"For two years, Natalie Hampton ate lunch alone. So after she changed schools..."

"... whenever she saw someone eating lunch alone, she would invite them to join her friends at their table. She knew that by saying 'sit with us,' she protected other children from becoming untouchable. 'Each time, the person’s face would light up, and the look of relief would wash over [it],' she says. 'Some of those people have become some of my closest friends.' Natalie was willing to give up her social capital, but she discovered that when a person has friends, spending social capital by befriending those without it lifts people up without bringing anyone down. If 'sit with us' became the ethos in middle school, bullying would be a thing of the past."

From "Meet the Teen Who Discovered the Secret of Social Capital/Natalie Hampton turns the (lunch) tables on a social system that breeds bullies" (Psychology Today).

I'm sharing this story for what it ostensibly is but also because I had the weird twinge of a thought: Isn't this kind of how Trump became President?

ADDED: Another solution to the schoolkid's horror of sitting alone in the lunchroom: Hiding in the bathroom.

And here's a Reddit discussion of the problem where the top-rated answer is: "I used to bring a book with me or my sketchbook. After a while, I didn't even care if others would stare at me since I was preoccupied with something." Another solution there is: "look for the nerdy table. I used to sit at a table with a couple of nerdy friends and we always accepted anyone that walked up. We all had some form of social anxiety. Some of the guys barely talked and that was alright by us."

ALSO: I've created a new tag, "Trump and bullying," and I'm going back and adding it to old posts. There are, of course, many old posts that discuss the portrayal of Trump as a bully, but I've found at least one that matches the insight above. In a May 2017 post — "3 Civil War historians react to Trump's Andrew Jackson comments line by line" — I quoted a historian who said that "Historians have come to a consensus that slavery is the reason" for the Civil War. I said:

Experts rely on this word ["consensus"] so much these days. It makes me suspect that they intimidate and discipline each other into toeing a party line. Why don't these experts perform their expertise for the people when they are invited to speak in a general forum like the BBC? It's especially bad when you add moral opprobrium. Here, the message was, the experts all agree, so you should just adopt our conclusion, because it's what we say. But on top of that there's this dire warning: And if you don't accept our consensus, you're going to look like a racist. One of the reasons Trump won was because he offered the common people liberation from that kind of bullying from the elite.

Boldface added.