How to Fight Back

1789: “Let them eat cake!” — Marie Antionette
2025: “Let them seek help from Elon!” — the GOP

The president’s speech last night was hardly presidential. If there was a practical, sensible suggestion or note of common purpose in it, I missed it.

Instead, it was a tirade of lies, boasts, taunts and complete nonsense. It failed to reach the level of a high-school bully-in-chief egging on his clique of hooligans. It was an alpha-male ape baring his fangs and beating his chest, endlessly, repeatedly and nauseatingly. It was a 100-minute long display of ape-like dominance.

Through it all, the Dems sat mute, sullen, disorganized and beaten. Democratic Representative Melanie Stansbury of New Mexico (my state) stood tall and austere, on an aisle in view of TV cameras. Mutely, she held a small sign saying “This is not normal.” An even taller man reached across the aisle and ripped it from her hands. (So much for civility!)

Some Dems held signs reading “FALSE” to highlight lies and half-truths, which the WaPo — with care and merciful brevity — later catalogued and debunked here. The “highlight” was an endless list of post-centenarians allegedly receiving Social Security, reflecting a well-known computer-programming glitch that, in reality, had produced no improper payments.

The Dems could have all worn the same garb. (Funeral black would have been appropriate.) They could have all held up “FALSE” signs in unison. Before or after the endless, false list of long-dead seniors allegedly “receiving” Social Security, they could have risen in unison and walked out.

It would have been far better had no Dem attended. Then the Demagogue would have had no foil. His boasts and taunts would have rung as shallow and puerile as they were.

All the Dems could have better spent their precious time consulting with their lawyers on their suits before the last uncorrupted branch of government — the judiciary. (Most of them are lawyers, too.) They could have organized their teams better to respond to constituents’ requests for help, which will no doubt surge as the federal government grinds to a halt in a storm of firings, layoffs, relocations and chaos.

But they did none of this. Instead, they served as props in our dear leader’s adolescent dominance play. Our Founders were turning in their graves with enough angular momentum to replace a coal-fired power plant.

Some days ago, the Clintons’ political strategist James Carville, now eighty years old, published an op-ed proposing a strategy. (It was he who coined the slogan, “It’s the economy, stupid!”) Stay mute and inactive, he suggested. Do and say nothing, at least not publicly. Let the government and our economy self-destruct under the “leadership” of this madman. Then step in to pick up the pieces.

Let the voters who elected him come to understand what they have done. Eventually, the tide of chaos will rise to touch their lives and they will have their epiphany. Or at least enough of them will to move the nation back toward reason and pragmatism. Some of this might even happen before the midterms.

That’s a tough prescription. I balked at it at first. But on reflection, I believe the Dems have no other choice. As Caesar said in crossing the Rubicon, “The die is cast.” The country is divided, practically down the middle, between people who get mostly accurate news and think logically, and those who put blind, if not ecstatic, faith in their madman. The latter will not wake up until they feel real pain.

So the Dems had best do nothing, at least publicly. They will only open themselves to dominance-inspired ridicule and widen the divide.

But—and here’s the codicil—they can and should do everything they can in private. They can plan and organize. They can aid constituents and soften the blow of national chaos for the most unfortunate and most aggrieved. They can build strong roots in the communities they serve, reaching “across the aisle” to teach by example, decency, pity and mercy. They can even reach out to Christians who don’t believe that Jesus was a high-school bully.

It’s a fine line to walk, to be sure. But it’s the right one. The madman is where he is because he excels at one thing only: using modern media to put on a great show.

Whereas Caesar had only the Coliseum and the Forum, our dear leader has electronic media that reach into every living room, most bedrooms, and practically every pocket. So the only rational recourse is to work behind the cheap scenery, to focus on the judicial branch and the people in their homes.

If that fails, the next step will be a replay of the Fall of Rome at “Warp Speed,” or a second civil war. If it comes to that, the blue states will win again, for they command two-thirds of the nation’s GDP.

Maybe the Red and Blue states can avoid that catastrophe by going their separate ways. The Red can join the Third World, which shares their worldview, while the Blue can try to recapture the Enlightenment, which frowned on making dominance the prime value, as in Machiavelli’s The Prince.

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