And yet! What made the interview so supremely strange was the fact that it wasn’t just Megyn Kelly who was using it to claim her own victimhood. It was also … Donald J. Trump.

Kelly: Let me ask you about that, because most American parents try to raise their kids to not bully, to not name-call, to not tease, not taunt. How can they effectively bring that message when the front-runner for the Republican nomination does all of those things? Trump: Well I do it, really—you know, I’ve been saying during this whole campaign, that I’m a counter-puncher. You understand that. I’m responding. Now, I then respond times, maybe, 10. I don’t know. I respond pretty strongly. But in just about all cases, I’ve been responding to what they did to me. So it’s not a one-way street.

So. Here was Megyn Kelly—who is, culturally speaking, one of the most powerful people in the country—claiming to confront her bully. And here, too, was Donald Trump—who enjoys the same status—rejecting the premise. Here he was, instead, explaining his own bullying behavior by claiming that he is, in his own way, a victim. I’ve been responding to what they did to me.

There the two were, engaged in an implied competition that would be paradoxical were it not so perfectly calibrated to the cultural moment: Who is more aggrieved? There they were, expanding the definition of bullying beyond the schoolyard and into the televised echelons of American culture.

It’s fitting, in one sense, that “bullying” would prove to be semantically supple. The term, perhaps derived from the Middle Dutch boele, or “lover,” first appeared in English texts in the middle of the 16th century—as a synonym for “sweetheart” and “darling.” (It was initially applied to either sex, but soon took on a distinctly masculine air—occupying, the OED notes, “a place comparable to that of today’s ubiquitous dude.”) Shakespeare, in particular, was a fan of the word: “I love the lovely bully,” Pistol declares, of his king, in Henry V.

It’s this sense of the word that Teddy Roosevelt was invoking in his notion of the “bully pulpit”—a term that got its name not from, as Trump’s behavior would suggest, the presidency’s capacity to let its occupant act as a bully, but rather from the Shakespearian sense of the word. Roosevelt’s rosy coinage—the awesome pulpit, as we might put it today—suggested the presidency’s ability to serve as a platform for influence: power by way of charm, rather than of its opposite.

But the secondary sense of “bully”—of the (relatively) powerful, inflicting harm on the “(relatively) powerless—is the one that has endured most readily. It likely derives from the word’s evolution into a synonym for “swashbuckler,” or “blustering browbeater.” A “bully” came to mean, in the 17th century, a “hired ruffian,” or more specifically a “protector of prostitutes.” It acquired, essentially, the meaning that has defined most contemporary interpretations of “bully”: as someone who operates based on discrepancies of power.