371. Seven Rules for Surviving the Trump Term.

1. Pay attention only to what President Trump does.  If you think about what he says you'll blow your brains out.

2. Pay no attention to what his admirers say about him.  If you do you'll waste a lot of energy controlling your impulse to blow their brains out.  Or making tortured jokes about your attempts to find their brains.

3. Pay no attention to what his critics say about him.  If you've listened to him up to now you already know what he is.  You can skip most of the Op-Ed page of the New York Times, as I have been doing for weeks.   It's redundant.  Redundant knowledge, redundant evaluation, redundant attitude.

4. If you miss witty take-downs (Maureen Dowd, Gail Collins) go to publications (Mad magazine) or anthologies (Alexander Pope) taking down somebody else .  Trump is too easy.

5. Don't get worked up over little things, over symbolism, over potentiality, over the darkly menacing, over anything without perceptibly injurious consequences.  Save your energy so that when Trump commits the big offense, the action (it has to be an action) that will clearly hurt the country you'll be ready with plenty of energy, and won't have wasted it on petty indignations.  The principle here is The Principle of Parsimonious Outrage, and every efficient activist adheres to it.

6. Picture yourself at the top of a slippery slope.  It's long.  Four years.  Your companions, brought to the boiling point by the rising in-house heat (liberals have echo chambers too, you know), maneuver shadily, want to go outside the law, pull some dirty tricks.  Cabals of the enlightened and good.  In the open he's blocked at every turn.  Half for what he is doing, half for what he is.  A crisis, forced.  He's in the wrong.  Such a dog.  Any stick to beat a dog.  Who cares now if the sticks are legal or the beating fair?  A dangerous dog.  So we make an exception.  Just this once.  We'll go back to the laws as soon as the danger has been met.  And American democracy ends.

I'm having you picture an apocalypse, and all us enlightened people hate that, but don't be too sure the picture won't in fact come together.  More unlikely ones have.  So work against the coming together.  Don't even start putting the pieces in.

7. Never applaud ugliness, even in the name of the beautiful, even to head off ugliness.  Ugliness begets ugliness.  Trump ugliness begot the ugliness, the condescension, the offensiveness, of publicly lecturing one of his associates who had innocently attended a beautiful play.  Such insensitivity is never allowed when you're facing one on the good side, or indeed, any human being with feelings.  But these are monsters, so your people claim an exception. 

But you don't claim it.  You stop the movement right there.  You're against adding any pieces to a picture that might turn out to be apocalyptic.