President Daze
What you can do now to guard against this ever happening again
By Ciro Scotti
It’s been a bit more than a year since we started this bad psilocybin trip, though it feels like an eternity of megalomania, corruption, and degradation.
As far as anyone knows, there are more people on this planet than ever before. Some 8.2 billion and counting, according to Worldometer.
Yet, yet, yet, one almost 80-year-old man has been able to destroy or disrupt countless lives, sow chaos and cruelty, and leave the world spinning as crazily as a dreidel on a bed of pebbles.
The man himself is not exceptional, except in his outsized view of himself. However, what he has been able to foment and extort — abetted by truly fiendish lieutenants — is quite extraordinary.
Of course, it took more than Donald Trump and his cabal to inflict this torment on America.
The pernicious forces that have herded us to such a low and loathsome place are too numerous to list in their entirety, but among them are feckless Democrats, a “Christian” middle class reveling in its ignorance, charlatans of truth who feed that mindlessness, an ultra-monied class with no moral core, young men disaffected by their inadequacies, the debasing plague of social media, and relentless grievances spanning the social spectrum.
If you wake up each morning thinking, “This, too, will pass,” you’re right. It will, though it will take time to regain our footing as a people with depth, conscience, humaneness, tolerance, and purpose.
Meantime, we should be thinking about what can be done to prevent another coarse and callous Caesar from criminally wielding the enormous power we place in his or her hands.
The easy answer is to restrict that power. But what if there is a cowed Congress and a compliant highest-level Judiciary, as we have now? A near-total breakdown of checks and balances?
Enacting strict, Supreme Court-proof, campaign-finance laws that strip the wealthy of their ability to dramatically affect the outcome of elections with their wallets is essential. Ensuring that the military remains apolitical is also critical and will likewise require strong and courageous legislation. And reinforcing the guardrails that prevent the consolidation of media — including social media platforms — must be a priority.
In the short run, however, we are left with one primary tool: The ballot box. In our accelerated world — as we have seen — the time lag between the damage caused by an unrestrained despot and fair elections is now dangerously wide. And honest elections are under assault.
So we can’t simply wait for early November to roll around.
Protect the polls. Volunteer to be a poll worker or monitor. Scrutinize officials in charge of elections before voting for them and fiercely support their independence once in place.
Hit the streets again and again. Protests matter, as the brave denizens of bloody Minneapolis have demonstrated by sending an ICE battalion packing.
Boycott corporate stooges. Shunning Tesla is easy. Beyond that, it gets harder since so many of us have succumbed to the Amazon Economy and would have to have cold, dead hands before iPhones could be wrested from our grasps. But even small threats to corporate profits and reputation send a message. Ease up on Amazon purchases; get off Facebook, Instagram, ChatGPT, X, and any other product owned or produced by a Trump tech toad; avoid Walmart, stop smoking Camel and Newport, gas up somewhere other than Chevron (Walton family members gave more than $22 million to conservative PACs in 2024, British American Tobacco Co. poured more than $10 million into the Trump campaign, and Chevron ponied up over $7 million to elect a rubber stamp Congress); help further sink the ratings of co-opted CBS, from which Anderson Cooper just bailed; never buy anything from packaging companies Pratt Industries or Uline, or that comes in one of their boxes, if you can help it; etc.
Fund the legal fights. Contribute to organizations battling the Trump Administration in court. You may not agree with all their stances, but The New York Times has a tracker summarizing the cases.
Donate to resistance candidates. Even if they aren’t in your district, town, or state — and especially if they are in areas where MAGA’s hold is weakening.
Resist the temptation to tune out. Force yourself to read, watch, listen to the news from impartial source such as Reuters and the AP, and don’t stick to an echo chamber: Divides can’t be bridged if you don’t know what the other side is saying.
Arm yourself. (More on that next time.)
Keep praying.
NOTE: Follow us on Bluesky (@theconstanttribune.bsky.social), and for emerging music, please visit stereostack.beehiiv.com